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What is a Stress Test?

If you are suffering from heart disease, or your doctor think you’re suffering from heart disease, or possibly when your doctor just plain doesn’t like you, they may schedule for a stress test. These are tests designed to allow the doctor to see how your heart performs under stress, which gives a better picture of your cardiac health than simply taking an EKG while you’re sitting still.

Generally speaking, what your doctor is talking about when he says a stress test is a treadmill stress test. Here, the stress is exercise (you walking on the treadmill) and the heart is usually monitored by way of electrocardiogram, and they also keep track of your pulse and blood pressure.

How it actually works is that you walk on a treadmill while hooked up to all these gadgets. They slow increase both the speed and, by raising the incline, the difficulty level to see how your heart responds and how far you go. This is generally preceded by a warm up and followed by a cool down, because they are trying to test you, not kill you.

There are a bunch of things that they’re trying to test all at once. The big one is how much blood is getting to your heart at the various degrees of difficulty, because this is the primary way to evaluate your level of heart disease. They’re also looking at, if applicable, how well your medications are working and/or any surgery you might have had, like stents or a bypass.

The other reason that a stress test is handy is that it allows them to evaluate just how fit you are. Considering that you’re on a treadmill and they’re carefully monitoring your heart as you go through a workout, this allows them to tell exactly how much exercise you can do and how hard you can do it. Since exercise is crucial to your heart healthy, this is handy knowledge to have.

The downside to all this is that stress test is a pretty tough test. You’re on a treadmill, and the speed and the incline are constantly increasing. The whole point of the thing is getting your heart rate up, so no matter how fit you are, the actual test is going to be difficult, at best. It’s not quite a long march into exhaustion, but it’s pretty close. The test is also sometimes done with stationary bikes, but the over all protocol is essentially the same.

If you’re unable to exercise for some reason, they can also do stress tests by giving you drugs that cause your heart to speed up, producing the same kind of stress. This is more risky and more time consuming than an exercise stress test, so it’s usually saved for a last resort.

There are also nuclear stress tests, which can be done with either exercise or dugs as the stressor. The only difference is that they give you a harmless low radioactivity dye, and then use it to photograph your heart. This allows them to see specifically which areas of your heart are suffering from reduced blood flow.

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