Think anxiety in ordering heart tests: study

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Doctors diagnosing possible cardiac problems should take the patient's anxiety and depression into account when order heart tests, a new Canadian study suggest. An ECG stress test is often used to look for coronary blood vessel disease. During the test, electrodes from an electrocardiography machine are linked to the patient while they exercise on a treadmill. But in people pretentious by anxiety or depression, heart disease could be lessening under the radar in the ECG tests, according to the study. Researchers in Montreal tested more than 2,000 patients with ECG as well as a more luxurious and responsive procedure known as nuclear exercise stress testing, or SPECT.

This requires the inoculation of a radioactive dye into the bloodstream followed by a nuclear scan to assess whether blood flow to the heart is normal during work out. "When patients with anxiety had both tests done, nearly 25 per cent of the patients did not appear to have heart disease based on the ECG but were found to have the disease when we look at the SPECT results," study author Prof. Simon Bacon of the department of train science at Montreal's Concordia University said Friday. "This means that a number of populace may be under diagnosing if they only have the ECG examination." Among patients without anxiety, the ECG missed an analysis of heart disease about 20 per cent of time.

The study's authors suggested that physicians think doing additional screening of patients, such as simple pencil and paper tests, to charge for anxiety and depression. If a patient scores high for depressive or nervousness symptoms and has an ECG result that doesn't suggest heart disease, Bacon said, doctors should consider distribution them for more tests to be sure. The Montreal researchers said about 20 per cent of people with cardiac illness also suffer from anxiety or depression two times the rate among the general population. Doctors require being aware of the role that anxiety can play, agreed Dr. Andy Wielgosz, a professor of tablets and epidemiology at the University of Ottawa and a spokesperson for the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, which facilitate fund the research.

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