Explainer | Do you need a heart test? Don’t be scared of them – a Mayo Clinic cardiologist explains how they could save your life
- Stress tests, EKGs and echocardiograms are three of the main ways doctors can learn whether your heart is healthy or not
- There is no pain, a doctor says, and explains how the test results can help physicians understand how to make you feel better – and maybe add years to your life
Having a healthy heart is always the goal, but sometimes you need some help to make sure everything is working just right – that’s where heart tests come in.
Cardiac stress test
“It’s [a stress test] not a scary test. It’s not putting you mentally under stress,” says DeSimone. “It’s physically putting you under stress. I don’t want any patient to be scared or worried about a stress test. It’s not going to be harmful. It’s not going to be painful at all.
“A cardiac stress test is just that. We’re trying to see what happens when we put your heart under stress. We could do that with making you exercise. We could do that with giving you drugs to mimic exercise, even though you’re sitting down.
“We sometimes also do a nuclear stress test. In this test, we give you an injection of short-lived radioactive medications that are taken up by the heart so that we can get an image of the heart function at rest and with stress. These are safe and rapidly leave your system. There is no pain whatsoever.”
EKG
“It’s a 10-second snapshot of the electricity of what your heart’s doing – top of the heart and bottom of the heart,” DeSimone says. “During the test, you will lay down – again, no pain at all. They’ll put several sticky patches across the chest wall. It’s like giving the physician 12 cameras because there are 12 patches used for an EKG.”