Heart Disease Screening- What And When?

If you are worried about your risk of having a heart attack, then you definitely should be a getting heart disease screening.  Especially if you have a risky family history of heart disease and health issues. Even if you don’t though, with current lifestyles as they are you should still be getting a regular heart disease screening.

Generally, in patients over 40 who are healthy, you can obtain either an ECG or and EKG every 2-5 years or so.  Get one more often of you are older than forty, or if you have new or preexisting coronary artery disease risk factors.  This is mainly done to get a base idea of what is normal for your heart, to be better able to tell when something is abnormal.
Echocardiograms can also be done, but are more useful for finding faulty heart valves and reduced heart function, not for heart disease screening.

For folks over 50 who are basically couch potatoes, who exhibit multiple risk factors of heart disease, and who are about to begin an exercise regimen to improve their health should consider getting a stress test done.  It is unnecessary in active people unless they are experiencing symptoms of angina.

New patients expriencing symtpoms of angina will first get a stress test done.  If the stress test shows abnormalities, then the next step is to get a better look inside the arteries using a method called catheterization.  Sometimes results with a stress test are hard to decipher, and are not cut and dried with showing the normal or abnormal symptoms.

In that case the next step in heart disease screening would be to order a coronary CT test.  This test indirectly measures plaque in the arteries by measuring calcium in the arteries, since most plaque contains calcium as well.

It is best that instead of constantly doing a heart disease screening test and looking for coronary artery disease, look instead to up your preventative measures to help avoid heart disease altogether.

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