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TUESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2021
Understanding heart tests
By DEEDEE STIEPAN
Mayo Clinic News Network
Having a healthy heart
is always the goal, but
sometimes you need some
help to make sure every-
thing is working just
right. And that’s where
heart tests come in.
Health care providers
can order many types
of heart tests for their
patients, and it can get
confusing and some-
times scary. Dr. Christo-
pher DeSimone, a Mayo
Clinic cardiologist, hopes
to put patients at ease by
explaining what each test
is and does.
tions that are taken up by
the heart so that we can
get an image of the heart
function at rest and with
stress. These are safe
and rapidly leave your
system. There is no pain
whatsoever.”
The reason cardiac
stress tests are performed
is to see if the heart can
keep up when put under
stress. If not, usually the
main reason is the patient
cannot get enough blood
fl ow and oxygen to the
heart itself. This may
suggest blockages in the
arteries that feed the heart
blood and oxygen.
EKG
Cardiac stress test
“It’s (a stress test) not
a scary test. It’s not put-
ting you mentally under
stress. It’s physically put-
ting you under stress. I
don’t want any patient
to be scared or worried
about a stress test. It’s not
going to be harmful. It’s
not going to be painful at
all,” says Dr. DeSimone.
“A cardiac stress test is
just that. We’re trying to
see what happens when
we put your heart under
stress. We could do that
with making you exer-
cise. We could do that
with giving you drugs
to mimic exercise, even
though you’re sitting
down. We sometimes
also do a nuclear stress
test. In this test, we give
you an injection of short-
lived radioactive medica-
“It’s (an EKG) a
10-second snapshot of the
electricity of what your
heart’s doing ― top of the
heart and bottom of the
heart. During the test, you
will lay down ― again,
no pain at all. They’ll put
several sticky patches
across the chest wall. It’s
like giving the physician
12 cameras because there
are 12 patches used for an
EKG. This also gives us a
look into how healthy the
muscle is in the atrium
and ventricles, the top and
bottom chambers of the
heart. It’s a very helpful
test, noninvasive and a
very quick procedure,”
says Dr. DeSimone.
Echocardiogram
An echocardiogram
is essentially an ultra-
Dreamstime-TNS
Health care providers can order many types of heart tests for their patients, and it can get confusing and sometimes scary.
sound for the heart, and
it’s used to give health
care providers a better
look at a patient’s heart in
real-time.
“It provides a very
comprehensive look at
how the blood is fl owing
in the heart, noninva-
sively. Nothing’s going
inside of your heart. So,
again, it’s a painless pro-
cedure. Nothing to worry
about. But that gives us a
lot of information about
how healthy your heart is,
the size and shape of the
heart, how all of the walls
of the heart are moving,
how the blood is fl owing
across valves in the heart
as blood travels from
chamber to chamber and
to the rest of the body.”
Dr. DeSimone hopes
to take some of the fear
out of heart tests so more
people will be proactive
about their heart health.
“We’re trying to diag-
nose what’s going on
with your heart electri-
cally, structurally, and
what we could do to
make you feel better ―
or in certain cases pro-
long your life. We’re
always trying to improve
your quality of life,” says
Dr. DeSimone.
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