CONTEXT The degree to which financial factors may influence use of cardiac stress imaging procedures is unknown. OBJECTIVE To examine the association of physician billing and nuclear stress and stress echocardiography testing following coronary revascularization. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PATIENTS Using data from a national health insurance carrier, 17,847 patients were identified between Novemb...

During the last few decades, the continued growth and expansion of stress echocardiography in daily clinical practice has led to the search and development of new and more quantitative technologies in an attempt to reduce the subjectivity of wall motion analysis by conventional visual method. (1) The evaluation of coronary flow reserve by Doppler echocardiography and myocardial deformation para...

BACKGROUND A maximal negative stress echo identifies a low-risk subset for coronary events. However, the potentially prognostically relevant information on cardiovascular hemodynamics for heart-failure-related events is unsettled. Aim of this study was to assess the prognostic value of stress-induced variation in cardiovascular hemodynamics in patients with negative stress echocardiography. M...

The role of exercise testing and stress imaging in the management of patients with valvular heart disease (VHD) is reviewed in this article. The American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association and the European Society of Cardiology/European Association of Cardiothoracic Surgery have recently put emphasis on the role of exercise testing to clarify symptom status and the use of stress i...

Standards for echocardiographic laboratories were proposed by the European Association of Echocardiography (now the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging) 7 years ago, to raise standards of practice and improve the quality of care. Criteria and requirements were published at that time for transthoracic, transoesophageal, and stress echocardiography. This paper reassesses and updates th...

Stress echocardiography is a widely utilised test in patients with known or suspected coronary artery disease (CAD), valvular heart disease and cardiomyopathies. Its advantages include the ubiquitous availability of echocardiography, lack of ionising radiation, choice of physiological or pharmacological stressors, good diagnostic accuracy and robust supporting evidence base. SE has evolved sign...

In the current ESC/ACC/AHA guidelines, the selection of patients for cardiac resynchronisation therapy (CRT) is based upon the QRS duration, which reflects interventricular dyssynchrony. However, about 30% of patients do not respond to CRT. It has previously been demonstrated that the presence of left ventricular mechanical dyssynchrony is predictive of response to CRT after implantation. Most ...

Identification of dipyridamole-induced regional wall motion abnormalities by echocardiography has recently been proposed as an alternative diagnostic stress test for coronary artery disease. This study evaluates this new technique by comparing the results obtained (overall, regionally and by abnormality type) with those of thallium-201 myocardial imaging after dipyridamole stress in 25 patients...

Multiple studies published in the last 2 decades have demonstrated the usefulness of stress echocardiography in the diagnosis and prognosis of ischemic heart disease. In its pharmacological modalities, dobutamine stress echocardiography is used for the diagnosis of ischemic heart disease1 to identify patients with a poor prognosis after acute myocardial infarction2 and medically stabilized unst...