anti-ischemic therapy and stress testing pathophysiologic, diagnostic and prognostic implicationsanti-ischemic治疗和病理生理的压力测试,诊断和预后的影响.pdfVIP

Cardiovascular Ultrasound BioMed Central Review Open Access Anti-ischemic therapy and stress testing: pathophysiologic, diagnostic and prognostic implications Rosa Sicari* Address: CNR, Institute of Clinical Physiology, Pisa, Italy Email: Rosa Sicari* - rosas@r.it * Corresponding author Published: 20 August 2004 Received: 01 June 2004 Accepted: 20 August 2004 Cardiovascular Ultrasound 2004, 2:14 doi:10.1186/1476-7120-2-14 This article is available from: /content/2/1/14 © 2004 Sicari; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Anti-ischemic therapy, in particular beta-blockers, is the most commonly employed drug for the control of myocardial ischemia in patients with stable coronary artery disease. Its widespread use also in patients with suspected coronary artery disease has important practical, clinical diagnostic and prognostic implications because diagnostic tests are heavily influenced by its effects. In the present review, the pathophysiological mechanisms of ischemia protection by antianginal therapy are described. Not all stressors are created equal in front of the different classes of antianginal drugs and on their turn the different classes of drugs exert different levels of