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Stress Echocardiography in Stable Coronary Artery Disease

  • Echocardiography (JM Gardin and AH Waller, Section Editors)
  • Published:
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Abstract

Purpose of Review

Stress echocardiography (SE) is a well-established technique for the diagnosis and risk stratification of patients with known or suspected coronary artery disease (CAD). This review article summarizes the status of SE in CAD, including testing protocols, clinical efficacy and current use of newer technologies: myocardial perfusion, strain imaging, three-dimensional echocardiography and adjunctive carotid ultrasonography.

Recent Findings

Recent major findings in SE include the clinical value of myocardial perfusion imaging in multicentre studies, as well as when added to left ventricular (LV) wall motion assessment in clinical service. Additionally, SE has been shown to be more cost-effective than exercise ECG in patients with low-intermediate pre-test probability of CAD. Adjunctive atherosclerosis imaging by carotid ultrasonography (CU) to ischaemia testing by SE provides synergistic prognostic value, equivalent to hybrid imaging by PET-CT.

Summary

Despite the development of newer and more expensive imaging modalities, SE remains the cornerstone for the assessment of CAD and has excellent clinical efficacy, is safe and is cost-effective.

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Papers of particular interest, published recently, have been highlighted as: •• Of major importance

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cardiology, Northwick Park Hospital, Harrow, UK

    Sothinathan Gurunathan & Roxy Senior

  2. Department of Cardiology, Royal Brompton Hospital, Sydney Street, London, SW3 6NP, UK

    Sothinathan Gurunathan & Roxy Senior

  3. Biomedical Research Unit National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College, London, UK

    Sothinathan Gurunathan & Roxy Senior

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  1. Sothinathan Gurunathan
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Correspondence to Roxy Senior.

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Conflict of Interest

Roxy Senior has received speaker fees from Bracco (Italy), Phillips (Netherlands) and Lantheus Medical Imaging.

Sothinathan Gurunathan has no conflicts of interest.

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Echocardiography

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Gurunathan, S., Senior, R. Stress Echocardiography in Stable Coronary Artery Disease. Curr Cardiol Rep 19, 121 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11886-017-0935-x

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