Do you need a normal ECG, ambulatory ECG or exercise ECG?

Transcript

So the choice as to what kind of ECG you need will be made after your initial consultation and you may actually need all three types of ECG, a normal ECG, an ambulatory ECG and an exercise ECG. But typically all our patients will get a normal 12 lead ECG. That really gives us an idea about the basic electrical activity of the heart.

We think about it as a foundation of your cardiovascular health. So I would say everyone gets that. An ambulatory ECG typically for people we are worried about underlying arrhythmia as a possible cause for their symptoms.

So this is a device you pop on your chest, you walk away with it, you carry on doing your daily activities. And whenever you get symptoms of palpitations or dizziness maybe even, we can see what your heart rhythm was doing at that time. Now an exercise ECG is something we organise when we would like to see what happens to you during exercise.

Some people will say that they get dizzy during exercise or that they get palpitations during exercise. So an exercise ECG is a nice way of trying to precipitate what arrhythmia may be underlying those symptoms. Previously exercise ECGs were routinely used to figure out whether chest pain was caused by underlying coronary disease.

More recent guidance is actually very much recommended against that. So we don't really use exercise ECGs for evaluation of chest pain of unknown cause.