Stress echocardiography

Stress echocardiography has a number of advantages over exercise electrocardiography. It has superior sensitivity and specificity as it detects wall motion abnormalities, an earlier and more specific marker for myocardial ischaemia than ST segment depression. It can also localise ischaemia and identify hibernating myocardium. Compared with radionuclide imaging, stress echocardiography has similar accuracy but is cheaper and does not involve exposure to ionising radiation. The disadvantage of stress echocardiograph is that it requires expertise and specialist experience of at least 100 studies. Current research aims at improving objective methods of analysing results. The technique is justifiably being adopted throughout the UK.