A stress test reveals information about your heart that can’t be obtained through other diagnostics. Though all the different heart tests work together to create a complete picture of your heart health, a stress test is one of the most essential.
Dr. Laura Fernandes and our Woodlands Heart and Vascular Institute team offer expert stress testing in the comfort of our office. Here, you’ll learn what a stress test reveals and when you might need one.
Stress tests uniquely reveal how well your heart functions and if blood flow or electrical activity changes when exercise or medication forces it to work harder.
The test is well-named, as some conditions can only be detected when the heart is under stress because it must pump more blood.
The results of a stress test help us diagnose:
Coronary artery disease develops when a buildup of cholesterol clogs the heart's arteries, called the coronary arteries. Without treatment, the cholesterol plaque gradually enlarges and blocks blood flow.
While chest pain is a common CAD symptom, you may not experience any problems until you have a heart attack.
Heart arrhythmias affect your heartbeat. These conditions develop when there’s a problem with the heart’s electrical system.
Your heart may speed up, slow down, or have an irregular rhythm. Atrial fibrillation, the most common type of arrhythmia, causes a rapid, uncoordinated heartbeat that often feels like your heart is fluttering or quivering.
If you have heart failure, your heart can’t pump enough blood. This condition develops when the heart muscles are damaged, weakened, thickened, or stiff (cardiomyopathy). The damage may be due to high blood pressure (hypertension), CAD, a heart attack, or heart valve problems.
Heart failure causes fluids to build up, resulting in swelling in your belly, legs, ankles, and feet. You may also have typical heart symptoms like chest pain and shortness of breath, especially when you’re active.
If you have heart valve disease, it means that one or more of the heart’s four valves isn’t working.
The valves usually keep blood flowing through the heart in one direction. If a valve doesn’t open or close properly, blood flows in the wrong direction, limiting blood flow to your body.
Some people are born with heart valve disease. The problem can also develop in adulthood due to age-related changes, infections, and heart conditions.
Heart valve disease often causes fatigue, chest pain, dizziness, shortness of breath, arrhythmias, and ankle and foot swelling.
Stress testing is an essential tool for diagnosing heart conditions. We may perform a stress test to:
We may also use stress testing to determine how much exercise your heart can tolerate.
We perform several types of stress tests, depending on your symptoms and the reason for the test. During all stress tests, we monitor and record your heart activity with an EKG and watch your blood pressure and heart rate.
An exercise stress test involves walking on a treadmill. You start slowly, and we gradually increase the pace. You keep exercising until your heart rate reaches the target level, or you must stop because of symptoms.
If you can’t exercise, we can do the test using a medicine that increases blood flow to your heart. The medicine replicates heart activity similar to physical exercise.
You have the same exercise stress test, but we will take an echocardiogram before and after the test. Echocardiograms use ultrasound to produce images of the heart’s structures, valve movement, blood flow, and muscle contractions.
We send a radioactive tracer (Cardiolite) into your bloodstream through an IV. Then, we use a specialized gamma camera that detects the tracer and produces images showing blood flowing through your heart.
We take the images before and after you exercise so we can compare the changes. Nuclear stress tests reveal details about blood flow in and around the heart that we can’t see with other imaging techniques.
Call our office in The Woodlands, Texas, if you need a heart evaluation or want to learn more about stress testing. You can also submit the online form to request an appointment.
