The diagnosis of heart disease is a task reserved for health professionals, through additional examinations designed for this purpose. What are the methods used? Discover them now!
When doctors diagnose him with heart disease, the patient has to face the news that comes to him. But it must also take into account the lifestyle changes that this entails. Because beyond drug treatment, for cardiac arrhythmia for example, diet as well as physical exercise will be tools to control this type of pathology.
A cardiac pathology concerns the area of the heart. Unlike cardiovascular disease, which also includes arteries and veins. In addition to arrhythmia, there are other examples such as dilation of the heart muscle, infarctions and heart failure. When the pathology affects the internal valves, we can cite stenosis and prolapse.
We will use the same complementary methods for the majority of these disorders. The diagnosis of heart disease usually involves following the steps of a protocol that involves several examinations, from the simplest to the most complex. We detail them here.
What tests can diagnose heart disease?
As mentioned above, the complementary methods for diagnosing heart disease are the same for several pathologies. An electrocardiogram makes it possible, for example, to detect an arrhythmia and an infarction, although these pathologies are different.
Electrocardiogram
An electrocardiogram (ECG) is an electrical recording of the activity of the heart muscle. Thanks to electrodes placed outside the body, we can perceive the electrical variations emitted by the beating of the heart. They originate from the internal system, which contains heart tissue and controls the beat.
The test does not require anesthesia or special preparation. It is even carried out on an outpatient basis and the patient can leave after half an hour. Sometimes it is a routine check to follow any changes in the situation. In other cases, these are checks requested after an already established pathology, such as a heart attack or arterial hypertension.
The recording is materialized by the measuring device in the form of a document with a line marking the beats. The interpretation of the test depends on the training of the doctor. There are already established reading protocols that indicate the meaning of each line drawn.
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