The clinical use of stress echocardiography in ischemic heart disease

Cardiovascular Ultrasound

Review

Rosa Sicari¹  Lauro Cortigiani² 

[1] CNR, Institute of Clinical Physiology, Via G. Moruzzi, 1, 56124, Pisa, Italy;Department of Cardiology, San Luca Hospital, Lucca, Italy;

关键词: Dobutamine;    Dipyridamole;    Coronary Flow Reserve;    Wall Motion Abnormality;    Stress Echocardiography;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12947-017-0099-2

 received in 2016-12-22, accepted in 2017-03-15,  发布年份 2017

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

Stress echocardiography is an established technique for the assessment of extent and severity of coronary artery disease. The combination of echocardiography with a physical, pharmacological or electrical stress allows to detect myocardial ischemia with an excellent accuracy. A transient worsening of regional function during stress is the hallmark of inducible ischemia. Stress echocardiography provides similar diagnostic and prognostic accuracy as radionuclide stress perfusion imaging or magnetic resonance, but at a substantially lower cost, without environmental impact, and with no biohazards for the patient and the physician.The evidence on its clinical impact has been collected over 35 years, based on solid experimental, pathophysiological, technological and clinical foundations. There is the need to implement the combination of wall motion and coronary flow reserve, assessed in the left anterior descending artery, into a single test. The improvement of technology and in imaging quality will make this approach more and more feasible. The future issues in stress echo will be the possibility of obtaining quantitative information translating the current qualitative assessment of regional wall motion into a number. The next challenge for stress echocardiography is to overcome its main weaknesses: dependance on operator expertise, the lack of outcome data (a widesperad problem in clinical imaging) to document the improvement of patient outcomes. This paper summarizes the main indications for the clinical applications of stress echocardiography to ischemic heart disease.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s). 2017