Valuable Stress Test Information That Can Help You Today
People that have to do cardiac stress test tend to worry. Yet these tests are very short and non-obtrusive. You’ll be in and out before you know it, and perhaps the only unpleasant part is the actual exercise.
So when you do the test, your heart needs to be stressed. This way, they can see what is going on. Only a stressed heart can reveal any maladies or conditions that need to be tended to. The specifics, and generalities, of stress tests will be discussed in this article. Let’s begin.
Confirming whether or not you have heart trouble is something that your doctor will want to do if they suspect that you have this type of malady. It really depends on the situation and the method that they choose to treat you with. A catheter is usually inserted into the person to view the artery if a person is having a heart attack. Most physicians will recommend a cardiac stress test. The patient will have to do exercises to raise their heart rate. A not so serious symptom, angina, is experienced by many people. Most skilled doctors will get imagery of your heart, arteries and veins that something is going on. The potential of having a heart condition will be confirmed with a stress test that your doctor will order. The results will tell you everything.
The echocardiogram gets the name because of the use of sound waves to produce an image of the heart. Different methods are used for measuring heart activity. A treadmill would be an example of this. The EKG was the predecessor of this test which utilized electrodes on the chest at strategic locations.
Then the electrical activity of the heart can be transformed on the recorder and that’s the EKG. Essentially, both the EKG and the echocardiogram can be used by the doctor for one diagnosis. Since the patient is running on the treadmill, their heart rate will be up. It is the elevated heart rate which provides the images that you get. Since the images are like videos, a trained doctor needs to interpret the data.
The stress test for your heart implies a number of things. If the doctor orders a test, then that means the person is actually capable of doing this type of exercise and testing. Your physician would probably not order a stress test for you if there was the possibility that a heart attack would actually occur. In most cases, those that are likely to have a heart attack during such a test will not be ordered to have one. What will likely happen is the doctor will have a catheter inserted into the patient’s major artery through the leg area instead. Then they feed the catheter up toward the heart so they can get a video feed and actually look inside an artery. There are some risks with this procedure that are not often discussed. The type of data the cardiologist gets from a test is what differentiates them. Imaging tests are relied upon for patients who are considered to be more at risk. If a simple EKG reading is desired from a treadmill stress test, there’s a good chance things aren’t quite as severe as they could be.
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