1.Indications for cardiac stress testing.
2.Contraindications for cardiac stress testing.
A great way to understand cardiac stress testing is to divide it into 1) The type of stress (exercise versus pharmacologic) and 2) The assessment of response (ECG, echocardiography, or radionuclide imaging).
When you stress the heart with exercise, you may or may not need to use imaging. For example, if the if the ECG is “interpretable”, you can do exercise stress test with ECG alone without imaging. But if you can’t interpret the ECG, you can still do exercise but with imaging to look at the heart.
When you stress the heart with medications (pharmacologic), you always need imaging.
The most commonly used and widely available stress testing modalities are:
- Exercise electrocardiography (ECG; non-imaging) and
- Exercise or pharmacologic stress combined with imaging (stress echocardiography or stress radionuclide myocardial perfusion imaging).
3. Exercise stress.
4. Pharmacologic stress.
5. Imaging.
References
Circulation. 2013 Aug 20;128(8):873-934. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23877260
Askew, J. Wells, et al. Selecting the optimal cardiac stress test. In: UpToDate, Post, TW (Ed), UpToDate, Waltham, MA, 2017.