What happens during a stress echocardiogram?
Dr Ravi Assomull describes how a stress echocardiogram works. In this video, he explains how exercise or medication is used to assess heart function under stress and identify potential issues with blood supply.
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Transcript
During a stress echocardiogram our aim is to get your heart rate up to 85% of your maximum predicted heart rate and we do that in one of two ways we either get you to exercise on a treadmill or using a bike or we actually give you a medication to speed your heart up something called Dobutamine is the medication we do for that. So that's how we achieve the stress that can be physiological with exercise or pharmacological with medications such as Dobutamine. Now the key thing in a stress echocardiogram is we want to assess your heart muscle when you are at your near peak exercise or peak heart rate levels.
We do this by taking pictures of the heart and what we're looking for is to see if any part of the heart starts pumping less forcefully because that may suggest that that part of the heart muscle isn't getting adequate blood supply.
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