Hi! I’m Dr. Joseph Falsone. A very common question that we get is “Do I need a stress test,” and “If I do need a stress test, what is a stress test?” There are a lot of reasons why people would be needing a stress test.
Criteria for it, if you’re at high risk for having a heart problem:
- are you short of breath?
- are you having any chest tightness?
- are you having any chest heaviness?
- is there any left-arm discomfort?
- is there any jaw pain?
Those are all common symptoms. Another reason we do a stress test is if you have a strong family history.
And then people may ask “I can’t walk that well, how am I going to do a stress test?”
We have many different ways of getting your heart going. We don’t have to have you walk on a treadmill. We have a chemical stress test where you can just sit there. I do all the work for you. You just sit there, and that is enough to stress your heart. And it’s basically painless—you feel nothing.
These stress tests are very accurate because we take pictures before and after we stress you—so whether you’re walking on a treadmill or you’re getting a chemical—we’ll take a picture before and after. Because of that, it takes a fair amount of the morning, so you’re here with us in the morning, and we usually can get you out of here in three to four hours.
But this is a very accurate stress test. It’s not just walking on a treadmill and looking at your EKG. We look at how the blood flow is distributed in your heart. If the stress test is normal—if we feel that you’re getting all the blood flow you need for your heart—I will call you the next day and tell you everything looks great.
If there’s a part of the heart that doesn’t look like it’s getting enough blood flow, again I will call you the next day, and we’ll talk about what the next step is. And the next step may be an angiogram, looking at your arteries with an x-ray, or it may be doing nothing and we treat you with medications.
Either way, you’re going to get a call from me the next day. I always warn my patients:
1) you’re going to get called by me
2) don’t worry when you get called by me; it doesn’t mean that this is horrible news.