What is a Stress Test?

A stress test is a procedure that we do to try to define people's symptoms, what's causing their chest pain, what's causing their shortness of breath, what's causing them to be tired all the time.  It can be either through exercise on a bicycle or on a treadmill, or it can be done pharmacologically, which means putting a medicine into the vein.

We learn a lot about the patient. We put an EKG on their, the leads on their chest when they exercise.  So then we look at their electrocardiogram after they exercise and during the exercise to see if there is any abnormalities. 

Rarely do we just do a plain stress test anymore.  It's always accompanied by the nuclear imaging. It is a procedure where a radioactive material is injected into a vein and then we put the patient under a nuclear camera and we count the amount of radioactivity as to how it's picked up by the heart muscle.  If you have an obstruction to the flow of blood through the heart, if it won't go through the heart, it won't pick up the radioactivity, and when we look at that on the camera, we can see that there is a blank space, so it tells us there is no activity in that area.

We do this as an outpatient in the Professional Building. We also do inpatients in the inpatient part of the hospital, on the first floor. We do them all, every weekend, so if somebody is admitted to the hospital with chest pain, we can do their stress test while they are here.  Outpatients, we do 5 days a week.