What is a Stress Echocardiography test?

Good morning Dr. Lamonaco. Good morning. So for instance your cardiologist has asked you to have a stress echo. I was wondering whether you could tell us what is a stress echo? Okay stress echo is a test which is used to make sure that your arteries of the heart are not blocked. A stress echo can be done in two different ways. One could be a normal way which is through a treadmill so you run on a treadmill or it can be done with the medication which we put inside your veins which will make your heart beating faster. So this test will make us understand whether your symptoms such as pain or difficulty in breathing are due or not to block the arteries. The test consists, the treadmill stress test consists in doing a scan of your heart first, a heart ultrasound, then you run on a treadmill, your heart is put under stress and then we repeat again the ultrasound of your heart to see whether under stress the heart has suffered and we can see the pictures of the heart then when he's moving very fast and we see whether an artery is blocked or not in an indirect way. Well in the dobutymyst assay the principle is the same but you don't run in a treadmill you just inject the medication inside your arms which will make your heart beating faster so will mimic, will simulate the running on a treadmill. So these two tests are very important because when you have symptoms such as pain, difficulty in breathing, always the query is, is coming from the heart or not? So this test will make us understand whether to exclude a problem in the heart or whether we have a suspicion of a problem in the heart for which you will need an angiogram which is a test through which we inject a contrast and we'll see your heart. Thank you very much.