AIMS The value of exercise electrocardiography in evaluating women with suspected coronary artery disease is limited. Conversely, stress echocardiography is effective for both diagnostic and prognostic purposes in females. The purpose of the study was to determine the relative prognostic value of exercise electrocardiography and pharmacological stress echocardiography in a cohort of women with ...

1) Coronary artery disease in women differs from men in several ways, including their response to many diagnostic tests.2) Strong comparative data on stress echocardiography for detecting coronary artery disease in women are lacking, but existing data consistently show sensitivity comparable with other high-sensitivity tests and superior specificity, increasing its diagnostic accuracy.3) Pharma...

Noninvasive techniques for assessing coronary artery disease (CAD) have improved dramatically over the past 20 years. This is particularly true with the advent of pharmacological stress testing in patients who are unable to exercise. Because myocardial perfusion and function are closely coupled, state-of-the-art stress imaging modalities have involved assessment of myocardial perfusion with rad...

Echocardiographic contrast agents have great value in combination with stress echocardiography. Their conventional role is to enhance left ventricular borders during suboptimal imaging, and the test is widely, if not universally, applied for this purpose.1 The use of echocardiographic contrast agents unequivocally improves endocardial resolution,2,3 facilitating concordant test interpretation,4...

When we deal with the results of a diagnostic test such as stress echocardiography, we tend to be more interested in the abnormal results. However, in non-invasive imaging of coronary disease, calling a study falsely normal often causes more problems than a false-positive diagnosis, which can be corrected by consecutive tests. It is good clinical practice to finish cardiac assessment in those p...

Our study was undertaken to assess the prognostic significance of pharmacological stress echocardiography in 325 diabetic patients. Pharmacological stress echocardiography was performed for diagnosis of coronary artery disease in 128 patients, and for risk stratification in 197 patients. Follow-up was 34 months. Cardiac-related death and non-fatal myocardial infarction were considered hard even...

Stress echocardiography today has matured into a robust and reliable technique not only for the diagnosis of suspected coronary artery disease (CAD) but also for the accurate risk stratification of patients with suspected and established CAD. This is mainly because of rapid advances in image acquisition, digital display, and the development of harmonic and contrast imaging. Stress echocardiogra...

The non-invasive diagnosis of coronary artery disease by exercise electrocardiography is less accurate in women than in men, with a high rate of false-positive results in women. In contrast, recent studies have demonstrated that stress echocardiography in women is more accurate than exercise echocardiography and that the significantly higher specificity of stress electrocardiography may have th...

BACKGROUND Late cardiac events after non-cardiac major vascular surgery are an important cause of morbidity and mortality. The aim of the present study was to assess the value of a preoperative dipyridamole echocardiography test (up to 0.84 mg/kg over 10 min) in predicting late cardiac events in survivors of major non-cardiac vascular surgery. DESIGN Large-scale, multicenter, prospective, obs...