Your heart is the fist-sized central organ of your circulatory and cardiovascular system, made up of your atria, ventricles, valves, and septum. It’s connected to your arteries, veins, and blood vessels throughout your body, using blood pressure to keep your blood moving.
Pumping 2,000 gallons of blood and beating 115,000 times a day, this powerful muscular organ pushes blood all through your body to give it the oxygen and vital nutrients it needs to keep everything going.
Keeping your heart healthy is very important, and there are several common factors that can lead to heart disease and cause problems for your long-term health if your heart isn’t cared for properly. To detect these conditions, screenings like treadmill stress tests can be very useful.
If you live in the Beverly Hills, California, area, and you’re dealing with symptoms of heart conditions that need tests to confirm and treat, Dr. Shawn Veiseh and his dedicated medical team can help.
To find out more about treadmill stress tests and how they can help, let’s examine the types of heart conditions that can compromise your health, how this stress test works, and what the procedure itself is like.
When your blood pressure is too high, too low, or when there are blockages that keep your blood from moving, heart disease and other conditions can become a problem. And since heart disease is the leading cause of death across the board, these common heart problems need to be addressed as soon as symptoms arise:
When your heart beats too slowly, quickly, or irregularly, it causes signs like chest pain, dizziness, lightheadedness, chest fluttering, shortness of breath, racing heartbeat (tachycardia), and fainting (or near fainting).
This is when heart problems are present at birth but may not appear until years later with signs like hand and feet swelling, getting easily winded, and shortness of breath from regular activities.
This is the term for damaged or diseased heart muscle conditions which may not show immediate symptoms, but when signs do start to show, you could experience fatigue, rapid, pounding, or irregular heartbeat, swollen ankles, legs, and feet, and shortness of breath.
This happens when there’s damage to one or more of the four valves of your heart (aortic, mitral, pulmonary, and tricuspid) which can result from narrowing, leaking, or prolapse. This issue can lead to symptoms like chest pain, fainting, fatigue, irregular heartbeat, shortness of breath, and swollen feet or ankles.
This process is a way to test your heart while you go through physical activity that makes it work harder and faster. When you engage in physical actions, your heart pumps harder to keep your blood flowing. Moving on a treadmill at different speeds can measure your heart rhythm, blood pressure, and breathing.
Using this method allows us to make informed determinations about your heart’s health, make treatment decisions, and determine how serious your heart problem is. Specifically, the treadmill stress test can be used to diagnose coronary artery disease, heart rhythm problems, and determine how well treatments for heat conditions are working.
There are also different variations of the test, such as the exercise stress echocardiogram, the nuclear stress test, and the cardiac rehabilitation stress test. Regardless of the changes in methodology, the goal is the same: to gather vital information on the health of your heart.
If you’re dealing with any of the symptoms listed above and need a treadmill stress test or other screening to determine your cardiovascular health, make an appointment with Dr. Veiseh and his team today. Call our office or schedule a visit online.
