The Cardiac Stress Test Is Used To Diagnose Coronary Artery Diseases
There will certainly come a time in every person's life when it becomes necessary for them to undergo testing for stress and the feedback that they get from such stress tests have the effect of making them become less anxious and thus able to lead a more productive and stress-free life. Of course, there are a number of different stress tests that you can take, though the cardiac stress test which is an introductory and physical type of stress test is a good option worth taking if you need to assess the functioning of your heart muscles.
Find Out How Your Heart Is Functioning
The aim of taking cardiac stress test is to allow your physician to get a good idea about how your heart is functioning and to also evaluate pulmonary functioning, and this can best be achieved by having a person being hooked up to an EKG after which he or she will need to gradually increase the speed as also incline of a treadmill till he/she reaches a fast jogging speed.
Basically, the cardiac stress test is meant to evaluate the flow of blood from the arteries to the heart muscle while a person performs a physical exercise and then compares these readings with the flow of blood in the arteries when the body is at rest. Thus, after undergoing the cardiac stress test, it is possible to assess the overall level of physical fitness in the person though it needs to be emphasized that such tests do not provide any assessment with regard to emotional stress or any other manifestation of stress as we know it.
All that the cardiac stress test can do is to test for abnormalities which will indicate any imbalances in the flow of blood to various parts of the left ventricular muscle tissue in a person's heart. Since the left ventricular does maximum amount of work with regard to pumping blood to the rest of the body, such tests help show up imbalances of the flow of blood in your heart muscle.
Thus, of all the different types of stress testing that can be performed, the cardiac stress test is most commonly used to determine the presence of as well as extent of coronary artery diseases. In its basic form, the cardiac stress test helps doctors evaluate the functioning of the heart as well as the vascular system while the body is performing exercises and it is also used to get answers to whether an underlying heart disease is present, and if so, the level of its severity.
In the final analysis, a cardiac stress test is used primarily to diagnose coronary artery diseases which cause blockages in a person's coronary arteries that will further affect the amount of blood supplied to heart muscles, and when this supply is insufficient, it causes starvation of oxygen in the heart muscles, leading to discomfort in the chest and thus warrants having tests done to determine the causes.
