Nuclear stress testing is a very safe and easy diagnostic procedure that allows your physician to diagnose coronary artery disease. Please call the office if you have any questions or concerns about your nuclear stress test. Learn More. Preparing for Your Nuclear Stress Test When preparing for the nuclear stress test, you will receive pre-procedure instructions. During the Procedure We ask that you arrive for your stress test approximately 15 minutes before your appointment time to register.
Results and Next Steps Normal results from a nuclear stress test are typically a good indicator that there is no significant cardiovascular problem that needs immediate attention. Request an Appointment. Patient Referring Physician. Preferred Contact Method Phone E-mail.
Connect on Facebook. Our Locations. Use the DropDown to the right to choose a location P: Marlton P: Haddon Heights P: Washington Township P: Elmer P: Vineland P: Woodbury P: F: Sicklerville P: Sometimes, nuclear stress tests are used to manage treatment, using the imaging results to determine how well a specific treatment is working.
After a period of rest, the doctor will take additional images of your heart. At the end of your test, your doctor will evaluate both sets of images and compare them.
The images show how your heart is functioning both at rest and when active, and they can also evaluate how well blood is flowing to and from your heart. By carefully examining the images, your doctor will be able to tell if your heart is functioning normally, or if there are areas where damage might be interfering with normal blood flow or heart function. Then, the doctor can inject a special medicine that increases your heart rate safely, mimicking the effect of exercise before capturing those images.
Those instructions will tell you whether you need to skip meals before your test and whether you should continue taking certain medicines or wait until after your test to take them.
Be sure to follow the instructions carefully, and call the office if you have any questions. Having a regular heart checkup is an important part of making sure your heart stays healthy, especially as you get older. Risk factors such as diabetes, family history of CAD, hyperlipidemia high cholesterol , hypertension high blood pressure , and more can lead to a higher chance of CAD. Risk factors along with symptoms , such as angina chest pain , dyspnea shortness of breath , decreased exercise tolerance , among others can indicate that a patient may currently have CAD.
Nuclear stress tests can be used to diagnose the potential presence of coronary artery disease. The heart pumps blood to every part of the body, and it too needs blood to work, just like any other muscle. When the heart muscle is exercised, it requires more blood to work harder. Sometimes, due to blockage within one or more coronary arteries, blood flow can be partially impeded or fully blocked from reaching the heart muscle tissue. Inadequate blood supply to the heart is called ischemia.
Ischemia can cause chest pain , shortness of breath , and decreased exercise tolerance in patients. Images of the blood supply to the heart can be acquired by using an injection of a radioactive tracer and viewing the tracer with a specialized radioisotope detecting camera.
A radioactive tracer, also referred to as a radiopharmaceutical or radioisotope , is a small amount of radioactive material bound to a molecule that can enter the heart muscle cells cardiac myocytes. The radioactive tracer itself does not cause the patient to feel any differently, and the radiation exposure received from the tracer is low, similar to many other diagnostic imaging procedures.
The most common radioisotope used is Technetiumm Tcm. For nuclear stress tests, Tcm is most commonly bound to molecules called sestamibi or tetrofosmin.
Both of these molecules have an affinity to attach to the cells of the myocardium heart muscle. Nuclear stress tests can be performed in many different ways, and each method produces equivalent results. It is becoming more common for some patients, especially new patients being seen for the first time, to be assessed with the Stress Only protocol; the patient is stressed, images are acquired, then reviewed by a cardiologist or radiologist.
If an abnormality is seen, the patient is then imaged under rest conditions for comparison. If the Stress Only image is normal and the reading physician is confident that the patient is at low risk, no resting image is needed. However, the standard of most clinics is to acquire both rest and stress images, so having to be imaged twice is no cause for concern. Many different types of gamma cameras can perform nuclear stress test imaging.
The cameras come in all shapes and sizes and have different benefits in terms of image quality, image acquisition time, and patient comfort. A nuclear stress test A three-dimensional image of the heart is acquired during a nuclear stress test.
The nuclear medicine technologist processes the images using specialized software. This software creates the slices of the heart, cleans up noise and artifacts, and applies a color filter for easier viewing.
A normal nuclear stress test image is shown below. A nuclear stress test can be thought of as a comparative test, i. In many cases, CAD and ischemia present themselves upon exertion of the patient, causing symptoms like chest pain and shortness of breath. Symptoms from ischemia are caused by the heart not receiving the blood it requires to function.
The picture above contains both Stress and Rest images. The Stress slices start at the very top and alternate with the Rest slices , which are displayed on every other row.
0コメント