Background—Noninvasive stress testing might guide the use of aspirin and statins for primary prevention of coronary heart disease, but it is unclear if such a strategy would be cost effective. Methods and Results—We compared the status quo, in which the current national use of aspirin and statins was simulated, with 3 other strategies: (1) full implementation of Adult Treatment Panel III guidel...

Coronary artery disease affects more than 385000 persons annually and continues to be a leading cause of death in the United States. Recently, the number of available noninvasive cardiac diagnostic tests has increased substantially. Nurses should be knowledgeable about available noninvasive cardiac diagnostic testing. The common noninvasive cardiac diagnostic testing procedures used to diagnose...

introduction: differentiating between ischemic cardiomyopathy (icm) and idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy (idcm) is important as coronary revascularization can improve prognosis in the ischemic subgroup. due to inherent problems of coronary angiography in patients with depressed ejection fraction (ef) introducing a noninvasive tool to diagnose those who will benefit from angiography seems to be...

Introduction Despite its low sensitivity and specificity (67% and 72%, respectively), exercise testing has remained one of the most widely used noninvasive tests to determine the prognosis in patients with suspected or established coronary disease. As a screening test for coronary artery disease, the exercise stress test is useful in that it is relatively simple and inexpensive. It has been con...

Introduction: Differentiating between ischemic cardiomyopathy (ICM) and idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy (IDCM) is important as coronary revascularization can improve prognosis in the ischemic subgroup. Due to inherent problems of coronary angiography in patients with depressed ejection fraction (EF) introducing a noninvasive tool to diagnose those who will benefit from angiography seems...

OBJECTIVE To determine the predictive values of noninvasive tests for the detection of allograft vascular disease. METHODS We studied 39 patients with mean ages of 48+/-13 years and a follow-up period of 86+/-13 months. The diagnosis of allograft vascular disease was made by cine-coronary arteriography, and it was considered as positive if lesions existed that caused > or =50% obstruction of ...

Coronary artery disease (CAD) accounts for 65% to 80% of deaths in diabetic patients. The merits of screening asymptomatic type 2 diabetic patients for either (A) the presence of coronary atherosclerosis by imaging of coronary calcification using cardiac computed tomography or (B) silent ischemia by stress myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) remain controversial. Some observers have advocated fo...

BACKGROUND High-rate pacing is a valid stress test to be used in conjunction with echocardiography; it is independent of physical exercise and does not require drug administration. There are two main applications of pacing stress in the echo lab: the noninvasive detection of coronary artery disease through induction of a regional transient dysfunction; and the assessment of contractile reserve ...

One hundred fifty-four patients referred for coronary arteriography were prospectively studied with stress electrocardiography, stress thallium scintigraphy, cine fluoroscopy (for coronary calcifications), and coronary angiography. Pretest probabilities of coronary disease were determined based on age, sex, and type of chest pain. These and pooled literature values for the conditional probabili...