Health Resource Center
Cardiac Stress Testing
Aug 21st 2008
Cardiac
stress testing is usually performed in an effort to evaluate symptoms suggesting
the presence of blockages in the blood vessels of the heart, commonly called
coronary artery disease. There are other reasons to perform cardiac stress
testing such as the detection of arrhythmias, the assessment of an individual’s
functional capacity or blood pressure response to exercise, for instance. In
many cases a stress test may be ordered to evaluate and detect early problems
in patients that have had PTCA or coronary artery bypass surgery, particularly
if there are clinical reasons to suspect recurrence or progression of coronary
artery disease or failure of the bypass grafts. Although most cardiac stress
tests are performed utilizing exercise, there are other methods available that
can provide the same type of information. In general, cardiac stress testing is
considered a safe test with rare complications. Your physician and testing
facility can describe these to you in further detail. The sections below
describe the types of "stress tests" and the imaging techniques that
are often combined with stress testing to increase the accuracy for detecting a
problem and gain additional information such as the strength of the heart.