Digital dipyridamole stress echocardiography in silent ischemia after coronary artery bypass grafting and/or after healing of acute myocardial infarction

Comparison of Digital Dipyridamole Stress Echocardiography and Upright Bicycle Stress Echocardiography for Identification of Coronary Artery Stenosis

“…The specificity obtained with dipyridamole stress in this study was excellent, and is in agreement with pre vious reports showing specificities in the range of 90-100% [11,12]. The moderate increase in contractility and heart rate as compared to dynamic stress may be favor able in order to avoid false-positive interpretations.…”

“…Unchanged regional wall motion was not used as a critérium for positive test, even during bicycle stress test. The inter observer agreement of dipyridamole stress echocardiography inter pretation in our laboratory has previously been shown to be 94% [ 12], In the present study, all tests were analyzed off-line by the same observer, without knowledge of patient data or to the results of other tests performed. In addition, ar.…”

“…With this scale, a left ventricle with normal segmental wall motion will have a score index of 1.00, and a ventricle with 4 o f the 16 segments being akinetic will have an index of 1.50. Wall motion abnormalities at rest and during stress were assigned to the distributions of the left anterior descending artery, left circumflex artery and right coronary artery, as defined elsewhere [ 12], Coronary Angiography. Selective cineangiography (50 frames/s) was performed by standard Judkins technique.…”