Diagnosing Coronary Heart Disease

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CHD is an abbreviation of Coronary heart disease. The diagnosis begins with recording the history of disease followed by physical observations of the person. Usually electrocardiogram (EKG) taken reflects the presence of abnormal functioning of heart, but the EKG some times misleads, because it shows normal readings in between attacks of angina.

Therefore it is advisable to advise the patient to perform some exercise do EKG recording during and after performance of exercise. The purpose is that let the angina take place by a physical activity and record the changes in progression from normal to induced angina. Thallium is injected in certain cases and stress induced pictures of the heart are viewed to see which part of heart is affected by coronary obstruction and to what extent. The procedure is called thallium scan.

The highly reliable test for diagnosing CHD is called cardiac catheterization. For conducting this procedure a minute catheter is introduced through the leg and manipulated for it’s entering the coronary artery. After wards a contrast dye is injected in the catheter, which reaches in all the coronary artery branches supplying blood containing contrast dye to the cardiac muscles. Thus the doctor is in a position to record the pictures of the cardiac muscles showing coronary arteries and location of the blockage for diagnosis of disease and deciding the treatment options.

Other diagnostic approaches, which help in diagnosis of CHD are stress echocardiograms and high resolution CT scans.

The Prognosis of CHD:

• CHD once set in progresses very fast unless it is kept in check by treatment and necessary precautions by change in the lifestyle of the affected person. If not checked in time, it can progress to myocardial infarction even sudden death if emergency medical help is not available.
• CHD is not of contagious nature. Although it tends to occur in families having history of cardiac disease.