What is an echocardiogram?

An echocardiogram is an ultrasound of the heart. It's done by a specialist technician in a specialist lab. There are several types of echocardiogram that can be done. The most simple is where you lie on a sofa and a specialist technician will scan your heart. It takes about 30 minutes and they will look at all of the areas of your heart. They will look at the valves and the chambers of the heart of which there are four and they will look at the pressures across all of these areas and what their volumes are. The reason we do this is we want to know how well your heart pumps out, any leaking of any of your valves or any stenosis which is a stiffening of the bowels which therefore impedes a good flow of blood from the lungs into the heart and out to the body. It gives us a good idea of how well your heart functions at rest. It will also tell us if you have any areas of the heart muscle that are not functioning and this may be because you have had a heart attack in the past and some of the muscle has died. Specific areas that may not be functioning can give us a good indication as to whether you will be able to withstand complex stressful surgery, that where the blood pressures will change dramatically and whether your body will deal with this. Gives us an idea of what your complications and risks are. Risks of having a heart attack, complications of needing medication to keep your blood pressure up and whether you will need to go to an intensive care unit post-operatively because you require those supportive drugs in the post-operative period. We also do things called a stress echocardiogram where we inject a drug which puts your heart in stress so that we have a better understanding of what your heart does when it's under stress, so as if you were doing exercise or your body was undergoing a big operative procedure. This tells us a lot about how each of the areas of the heart muscle react to stress and whether they will work well under stress and again this gives us a good idea as to whether you will be able to withstand a complex risky operative procedure. Now some medical conditions and pathologies like surge in surgery such as aortic aneurysms at a certain size we will not be able to do a stress echo as giving you the drugs that cause the stress response in your body in order to do the investigation put your aneurysm at risk and risk it rupturing so we would not be able to do that. We then gain a lot of this information from the conversations that we have in pre-operative assessment clinics, including what your exercise tolerance is like. How can you climb a flight of stairs? Do you get short of breath walking a short distance? Questions like this.