What are the tests for detecting congenital heart disease?
The most important thing to do in terms of detecting coronary artery disease is to have a relationship with a healthcare provider who will work to reduce your risk. If you have your risk reduced, and you develop symptoms of heart disease (chest discomfort, shortness of breath, fatigue,) then your healthcare provider will choose tests to see if coronary artery disease is the reason for those, and very commonly we use exercise testing. Exercise testing can be as simple as having you walk on a treadmill while we look at the electrocardiogram. And that test both helps us find coronary artery disease and helps us understand what the prognosis might be in you: is this a severe problem that's likely to cause you difficulty soon or is it a mild problem that's not likely to be such a difficulty and can be treated simply with medications? It's important that we get the tests that will define coronary disease and we make those specific for the person. For example, simple treadmill testing is less effective in women than it is in men, and often extra scanning tests of various kinds, whether with echocardiography or radionuclide's, will give us additional information that helps us be more specific in women than we could be if we did simple treadmill testing. But you want your healthcare provider to pick the test that will give you the greatest cost benefit that will cost the least and give you the greatest likelihood of finding a problem if it's there, and knowing what to do about it. Finally, if those tests suggest that there is a problem with the coronary arteries, then getting pictures of the coronary arteries, what we all an angiogram, is a very useful thing to do, and helps us know what the next steps should be, accompanied by the symptoms and the exercise tests we've had. For pictures of what an angiogram looks like, the American Heart Association has those on their web site, you can look up definitions and actually see pictures of what it looks like to get those tests done, but they're done very commonly and they're very helpful.
