Stress echocardiography: An overview for use in pediatric and congenital cardiology

Currently, the role of stress echocardiography primarily resides in diagnosing acquired coronary artery disease (CAD) in adults. Besides an increasing concern for traditional CAD in young patients due to obesity and other chronic pediatric diseases, there is also a growing population of adolescents and young adults with "at risk" coronary arteries due to: reimplanted coronaries in congenital heart disease, anomalous origin of the native coronary arteries, coronary abnormalities in Kawasaki's disease, and posttransplant coronary vasculopathy. Stress echocardiography is well suited for routine screening and monitoring in these patients. Also, due to the ability of stress echocardiography to provide real-time cardiac imaging, it is useful in areas beyond coronary ischemia. Utilizing Doppler derived velocities and pressure gradients, one is able to further evaluate and risk-stratify patients with valvular heart disease. In addition, stress echocardiography is useful in evaluating other areas including ventricular and coronary reserve. The benefits of stress echocardiography are it is: readily available, portable, and relatively cheap. It can be performed without sedation or radiation exposure which becomes very important in younger patients that require periodic monitoring. Stress echocardiography can also evaluate functional abnormalities instead of relative perfusion defects. Overall, stress echocardiography is currently an underutilized imaging modality that has a wide, and expanding, range of application in the practice of pediatric and congenital cardiology.