Dobutamine stress echocardiograms
Mildura Cardiology is leasing a room in Mildura Base Hospital, to improve the ease of performing echocardiograms on inpatients. The room is spacious and comfortable, and also allows us to perform other outpatient echocardiogram tests which would be more difficult to do in our Thirteenth Street premises.
One of these tests is a dobutamine stress echo. This test is used to investigate for coronary artery disease in patients who are unable to use a treadmill. Dobutamine is a medication which is given intravenously, and causes the heart to pump quicker and use more oxygen, much like exercise does, but with the patient resting. An echocardiogram is done at the same time to see if any part of the heart does not pump as strongly as it should, suggesting this part of the heart is not receiving it’s full blood supply, as can be caused by a coronary narrowing.
Several of these studies were done on 15th Oct 2015, and this is the happy Mildura Cardiology team – Margot, Lisa, Jo , Jan and Mitra. Margot and Lisa are Echo technologists, Jo is our Cardiology Registrar, Jan is one of our Nurses, and Dr Mitra Shirazi is one of our visiting Cardiologists from Adelaide.