EmpowHer:
Can you talk about stress tests?
Dr. Alfred Bove:
Thank you very much. These are my personal comments and don’t represent anything from the American College of Cardiology. A stress test really shows inadequate oxygen getting to the heart muscle. Now the way the inadequate oxygen is happening can be either a blockage of a large blood vessel blood stream or the small blood vessel is not relaxing enough.
So we can test that on a treadmill. There are some catheter procedures where they use certain drugs to see if they can improve the blood flow and show that there’s some constriction there and so the rush in protocols that we can go through now that show, pristine women with chest pain, it looks like its heart pain but we can’t show that there’s a blood vessel problem.
We can do some special testing to determine that there in fact is a problem and then develop a plan of treatment for it.
EmpowHer:
Is some of that medication or drugs that are used to test the heart create a little stress on the heart so you can watch to see how it reacts?
Dr. Alfred Bove:
That’s correct, yeah. Some of them are things that would dilate the blood vessels and we can see if the blood vessel is dilated appropriately and so on.
EmpowHer: What is that called?
Dr. Alfred Bove:
Well, there are a couple of different drugs that are being used. There is a drug called Persantin that is one of the dilating drugs in the heart. There is another called Adenosyl, which is a drug that dilates blood vessels of heart and we can sometimes tell from those drugs that there is a need for more relaxation. These are relaxing drugs. So if we see them improving the blood flow, we can then come up with some strategies for taking pills to achieve the same goals somewhat. These are medications we would give intervenously for a test.
Dr. Alfred Bove, MD, PhD is a Temple University professor emeritus of medicine, and their section chief of cardiology. Dr. Bove practices clinical cardiology with particular emphasis on heart failure, heart transplantation and he’s the Vice President of the American College of Cardiology.