People strive to lead a healthier lifestyle, but not everyone can jump the bandwagon and take on strenuous activities on a whim. Part of the factors worth considering is your heart health, which can be tricky to measure for those who don’t have current heart-related conditions. However, there are simple ways to determine whether you should worry about your heart in the future, and it’s called the stress test.
Seeing as heart disease is one of the deadliest conditions that plague Americans today, it pays to understand your body and know whether you’re prone to developing heart complications down the line. With that being said, a stress test can help diagnose your problem since it uses different exercises to evaluate your heart, monitoring key elements such as your blood flow, rhythm, and more.
What is a Stress Test and How Do You Do It?
As mentioned above, a stress test uses different exercises to prompt your heart to pump harder, allowing the doctor to identify underlying problems that often lay dormant when you’re at rest. Some stress tests that can reveal any heart troubles include the following:
- Exercise test or exercise stress echo
- PET stress tests
- Nuclear stress test
- Stress EKG
- Pharmacological stress test
- Sestamibi stress test
- Stress EKG
- Treadmill test
These different activities should expose any abnormalities in your heart rhythm, plus it should trigger symptoms like chest pain, palpitations, shortness of breath, and other signs of poor heart health.
Who Needs to Take a Stress Test?
Your doctor may likely recommend you take a stress test if you’re struggling with chest pains, dizziness, irregular heartbeat, or difficulty breathing. Alternatively, a stress test is also required after undergoing heart treatment, heart surgery, or testing whether your heart can handle taking on a labor-intensive exercise program.
Generally, a stress test is also a must if you have high cholesterol, obesity, high triglycerides, or live a sedentary lifestyle. These different factors contribute to your risk of getting heart disease.
The Bottom Line: Revealing Heart Problems Before They Escalate
Taking on a stress test can be a life-saving procedure that can uncover heart problems that would never have come up until it’s too late. It’s a simple way to measure the health of your heart, allowing you and your doctor to determine the next best course of action to improve your condition.
How Can We Help?
Here at Garden State Medical Group, our professionals strive to provide holistic care so patients can have access to integrative and functional treatment options. In this case, we can help create comprehensive guidelines that can protect your lungs from the detrimental effects of wildfire smoke.
Not only do we aim to understand the clinical aspects of your condition, but we also look into the biological and behavioral factors that impact your well-being. Check out our site and see what our primary care clinic in NJ can do to improve your health!