Echocardiography has the ability to noninvasively explore hemodynamic variables during pharmacologic or exercise stress test in patients with heart failure. In this review, we detail some important potential applications of stress echocardiography in patients with heart failure. In patients with coronary artery disease and chronic LV dysfunction, dobutamine stress echocardiography is able to di...

Background. The implications of hypotension occurring during dobutamine stress echocardiography have not been elucidated. We observed in some patients that hyperdynamic left ventricular function developed during dobutamine stress echocardiography and hypothesized that intracavitary obstruction was occurring and might account for hypotension in some patients. Methods and Results. Fifty-seven con...

OBJECTIVE To assess the prognostic value of stress echocardiography as an adjunct to exercise electrocardiography in patients with uncomplicated acute myocardial infarction. DESIGN 496 patients underwent a maximum exercise ECG and pharmacological stress echocardiography (406 dobutamine and 90 dipyridamole) within 15 days of uncomplicated acute myocardial infarction and were followed for a mea...

have 3.4 times the event rate of a normal LA size (0.5%/year vs. 1.7%/year). This might not merit further invasive workup. However, it does merit aggressive medical management of risk factors, because an event rate of 1.7%/year cannot be considered as benign as the same event rate in a mildly abnormal stress echocardiography study (wall motion score index 1.1 to 1.7) (12). Thus, we disagree wit...

STRESS ECHOCARDIOGRAPHY HAS EMERGED as an important imaging modality for the evaluation of patients with coronary artery disease (CAD). The rationale for using stress echocardiography stems' from the fact that CAD cannot always be confirmed or ruled out on the basis of symptoms and/or ECG fmdings alone. Moreover, stress echocardiography provides additional information on the cardiac mechanical ...

[1] Packer M. The neurohumoral hypothesis: a theory to explain the mechanism of disease progression in heart failure. J Am Coll Cardiol 1992; 20: 248-54. [2] Andrews R, Charlesworth A, Evans A, Cowley AJ. A doubleblind, cross-over comparison of the effects of a loop diuretic and a dopamine receptor agonist as first line therapy in patients with mild congestive heart failure. Eur Heart J 1997; 1...