- Hospital San Carlos Office from the HLA Group recently purchased a recumbent bike for performing stress Doppler echocardiography.
“Chest pain or fatigue when performing physical exertion, such as climbing stairs or walking down a slope, are common symptoms for which patients go to the cardiologist. Typically, this pain or fatigue is no longer present at the time of the consultation, so the challenge for the doctor is to investigate what happened at the time the symptoms appeared. The tests that we carry out during the consultation provide information about the state of your heart at that moment (usually at rest and without symptoms), but they may not be enough to reach a diagnosis, "says the Dr. Alfonso Valle, Head of the Cardiocare Unit of the hospital San Carlos de Denia of the HLA Group.
To find out how the heart At the time of making any effort, the conditions must be reproduced in a monitored environment. For this, the performance of the stress test or ergometry is usually indicated. The study of the behavior of blood pressure and the electrocardiogram of the patient while walking or running on a treadmill.
Other evidence available to cardiologist is stress echocardiography. According to Dr. Valle, “stress echocardiography is mainly performed on a bicycle, combining information from blood pressure and the electrocardiogram. In addition, in this case, the movement of the heart is visualized by means of a echocardiogram (heart ultrasound) during the exercise and since the patient is exercising comfortably in a semi-lying position, it allows the cardiologist to see how the heart works at all times”.
It is, therefore, a type of stress test more complete that allows to see if the different parts of the heart muscle contract normally during the effort, to rule out the presence of alterations in the coronary arteries, or to assess the functioning of the heart valves with the effort.
This technique is indicated for patients presenting chest pain or dyspnea (fatigue) with effort, for athletes with symptoms during physical exercise and for patients who present any valve disease and thus know its operation and potential complications during the effort, which may indicate the need to repair or replace said valve. It is also indicated for patients who have lesions in the coronary arteries, to set the indication for revascularization or not, and for patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (normal heart strength).
It is based on an echocardiography of the heart using ultrasound, for which the patient sits on the bicycle from where a complete echocardiography is performed, in which the contractility or motility of the different myocardial territories that in turn depend on different coronary arteries is observed.
The patient begins to pedal under a pre-established protocol adapted to the physical conditions that gradually increases. At each stage, an electrocardiogram, heart rate, blood pressure is recorded using electrodes, and motility or contractility of all myocardial territories is observed.
