What to know about heart tests
Having a healthy heart is always the goal, but sometimes you need some help to make sure everything is working just right. And that’s where heart tests come in.
Health care providers can order many types of heart tests for their patients, and it can get confusing and sometimes scary. Dr. Christopher DeSimone, a Mayo Clinic cardiologist, hopes to put patients at ease by explaining what each test is and does.
CARDIAC STRESS TEST
“It’s not putting you mentally under stress. It’s physically putting you under stress. I don’t want any patient to be scared or worried about a stress test.
It’s not going to be painful at all,” says DeSimone.
“A cardiac stress test is just that. We’re trying to see what happens when we put your heart under stress. We could do that with making you exercise. We could do that with giving you drugs to mimic exercise, even though you’re sitting down. We sometimes also do a nuclear stress test. In this test, we give you an injection of short-lived radioactive medications that are taken up by the heart so that we can get an image of the heart function at rest and with stress. These are safe and rapidly leave your system. There is no pain whatsoever.”
The reason cardiac stress tests are performed is to see if the heart can keep up when put under stress. If not, usually the main reason is the patient cannot get enough blood flow and oxygen to the heart itself. This may suggest blockages in the arteries that feed the heart blood and oxygen.
EKG
An EKG is a “10-second snapshot of the electricity of what your heart’s doing, top of the heart and bottom of the heart,” DeSimone says. “During the test, you will lie down. They’ll put several sticky patches across the chest wall. It’s like giving the physician 12 cameras because there are 12 patches used for an EKG. This also gives us a look into how healthy the muscle is in the atrium and ventricles, the top and bottom chambers of the heart. It’s a very helpful test, noninvasive and a very quick procedure.”
ECHOCARDIOGRAM
An echocardiogram is essentially an ultrasound for the heart, and it’s used to give health care providers a better look at a patient’s heart in real-time.
“It provides a very comprehensive look at how the blood is flowing in the heart, noninvasively. Nothing’s going inside of your heart. So, again, it’s a painless procedure. It gives us a lot of information about how healthy your heart is, the size and shape of the heart, how all of the walls of the heart are moving, how the blood is flowing across valves in the heart as blood travels from chamber to chamber and to the rest of the body.”
DeSimone hopes to take some of the fear out of heart tests so more people will be proactive about their heart health.
Microneedling has become one of the most popular anti-aging cosmetic treatments, and for good reason.
This in-office treatment is a favorite among dermatologists for treating fine lines and wrinkles, as well as indented acne scars and other blemishes related to collagen production.
See how microneedling works and why dermatologists recommend this treatment for skin aging:
USING YOUR SKIN’S NATURAL PROCESSES TO FIGHT AGING
Microneedling uses very small needles to create microchannels within your skin.
This treatment stimulates your skin’s natural healing process, during which collagen is produced to heal the micro-injuries in your skin. This uptick in collagen works to smooth away fine lines and wrinkles and can help to “fill in” indented scars and other similar blemishes.
While microneedling can achieve excellent results on its own, those results can be easily enhanced with topical products. Microneedling is often combined with PRP, or platelet-rich plasma, which is separated from your own blood and reinjected into the treatment area. PRP is believed to promote the healing process and aid in new cell growth.
Other topical products can enhance the anti-aging effects of microneedling when used two weeks prior to your treatment. These include retinoids and Alastin’s Regenerating Skin Nectar, which has been formulated to help skin heal after a procedure such as microneedling.
NO DOWNTIME
Microneedling does not require extensive downtime or recovery, making it a convenient anti-aging treatment for most.
However, you will need to avoid wearing makeup for at least 24 hours after your appointment, and you will see the best results after a series of four to eight microneedling sessions.
BOTTOM LINE
Microneedling is an effective anti-aging treatment for fine lines and wrinkles. Be sure to work with an experienced professional as complications can develop if not performed in a sterile environment by a trained professional.
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