Echocardiography Helps Identify Heart Disease

Mar. 23 -- FRIDAY, June 15 (HealthDay News) -- New uses of echocardiography to identify and stratify people with heart disease were highlighted Friday during the American Society of Echocardiography's annual meeting.

"Echocardiography has been around a long time, and it is part of the routine evaluation of heart disease," said Dr. Thomas Ryan, director of the Duke University Heart Center and the society's incoming president. "There has been a lot of technical developments and improvements over the last several years."

Echocardiography, which is basically ultrasound for the heart, is a very accurate and versatile test, Ryan noted. "It can be applied in a lot of different clinical situations," he said. "There is a new population that it is being applied to. It's useful in patients with symptoms, it's useful in patients with a high likelihood of having heart disease, and it is useful for defining the location and extent of heart disease."

In the first presentation, Dr. Farooq A. Chaudhry, director of echocardiography and associate chief of cardiology at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City, and colleagues used stress echocardiography in 447 women to identify their risk for heart disease.

"To identify women at risk for heart disease, we used stress echocardiography, which is done at rest and then during stress," Chaudhry said. "Using this technique, you can differentiate high-risk women from others. If you have an abnormal echo-study, you are three times more likely to have a heart attack or die from heart-related causes."

Chaudhry thinks this technique is more accurate than other methods for identifying heart problems, especially in women. It is a good way to evaluate women who have risk factors for heart disease, he said.

"If women have a history of heart disease, high cholesterol, obesity or diabetes or high blood pressure, this technique should be used to risk stratify them," Chaudhry said.

In another study, Dr. Saritha Dodla and colleagues from the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha found that by using echocardiography, they were able to identify diabetics who were at risk for heart disease even though they had no symptoms.