Exercise testing: uses and limitations considering recent studies.

Accurate use and interpretation of exercise test results depend on an understanding of physiologic principles, meticulous attention to proper methodology, and realization of the appropriate applications and limitations of testing. Understanding the relationship between myocardial and ventilatory oxygen consumption and exercise test variables will aid in the diagnosis and prognostic evaluation. Use of proper methodology in preparing the patient, performing the examination, and interpreting the results is critical to obtaining the maximum information with maximum safety for each individual patient. Improvements in methodology including the use of the Borg scale to estimate individual effort, abandonment of the predicted maximum heart rate, and the increased use of ventilatory oxygen uptake measurements should be applied. Exercise capacity should not be reported in total time but rather as the VO2 or MET equivalent of the workload achieved. This permits the comparison of the results of many different exercise testing protocols. The most useful exercise ECG variable for the diagnosis of coronary artery disease remains the ST segment shift. Unfortunately, it is not as helpful in localizing myocardial ischemia. Diagnostic accuracy can be improved by adjusting ST depressions for exercise-induced heart rate increase. Accuracy can be further increased by combining ECG, clinical, and radionuclide variables in probabilistic formulas that retain the independent diagnostic information from each variable and accurately predict disease probability. To avoid errors in clinical decision making, care must be used to insure that the mathematical formula used was derived from a population of patients that is similar to those being tested. The clinical applications for exercise testing include diagnosis of patients with chest pain syndromes, determination of disease severity, and prognosis in patients with known coronary artery disease, evaluation of arrhythmias, screening of asymptomatic patients, and evaluation of medical, surgical, and angioplastic therapy for coronary disease. In spite of studies involving thousands of patients, controversy exists regarding the diagnostic power of exercise testing. The large differences in reported accuracies are largely due to methodologic problems that have been encountered by various investigators. Clinicians should be made aware of these problems when reading the literature on ECG and radionuclide exercise testing. Such awareness will help them understand the limitations of these noninvasive procedures.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)