The diagnostic role of stress echocardiography in women with coronary artery disease: evidence based review

Abstract

1) Coronary artery disease in women differs from men in several ways, including their response to many diagnostic tests.2) Strong comparative data on stress echocardiography for detecting coronary artery disease in women are lacking, but existing data consistently show sensitivity comparable with other high-sensitivity tests and superior specificity, increasing its diagnostic accuracy.3) Pharmacological stress echocardiography appears to provide superior specificity to exercise stress echocardiography due to difficulties in test execution with the latter that increase the number of false positive results.4) Current evidence suggests that stress echocardiography should be the first-line diagnostic tool for detecting coronary artery disease in women with chest pain, but other noninvasive imaging tests may be valuable in some patient subgroups.