Heart Tests

The cardiac stress test is an exercise tolerance test given to see how well the heart functions under physical stress (CareNotes, 2001). The test is carried out in a clinic, hospital, or the doctor's office. It consists of riding a bicycle or using a treadmill while attached to a heart monitor to monitor your heart rate throughout the test, and to take periodic electrocardiograms (ECGs). If you are unable to walk or exercise, the test can be carried out by giving you an injection of a drug (dobutamine or adenosine) which mimics the effects of exercise on the heart. Cardiac stress tests are done for a number of reasons: to diagnose the cause pf chest pain; to see how the heart works during exercise after heart surgery or a heart attack; to diagnose heart disease; to diagnose arrhythmias during exercise; and to see how well medications control chest pain or arrhythmias during exercise.

A technetium heart scan is performed to evaluate the heart after a heart attack (De Milto, 2001). It can confirm a heart attack when the usual symptoms are absent; identify the size and location of the heart attack; and provide useful information on the patient's prognosis after a heart attack. It is useful when the ECG and cardiac enzyme studies do not provide definite results, such as after heart surgery, or when the pain was suffered more than 48 hours previously. It can also be used to evaluate the heart before and after heart surgery.

The Technetium scan uses a radioactive isot

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of the size of the cardiac chamber and ventricular function, and allows detailed assessment of valve structure. A graph of motion against time is used for making accurate measures of chamber size and wall thickness at specific points in the cardiac cycle. Doppler techniques are of three types: pulsed wave, continuous wave, and color flow (Berger, 219). Pulsed wave and continuous wave Dopplers are used to detect the direction and velocity of blood flow across heart valves, and in color flow imaging a pictorially colored representation of blood flow in the heart and across the valves is obtained. This can be used to determine the direction of blood flow, the presence of turbulence, regurgitation across valves, or abnormal blood flow patterns. Stress echcardiography is done to assess how well the heart muscle contracts under exercise conditions (Warkentin, 2001). The strength of heart muscle contraction depends on the amount of oxygen reaching the heart muscle. If a coronary artery supplying the heart with oxygenated blood is narrowed or blocked, the part of the heart that receives blood from that artery will not contract normally, particularly while exercising. In stress echcardiography, the patient doesn't usually exerci

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