“Why does a stress test use radioactive dye?”
Why exactly does a stress test use radioactive dye? I know that it's supposed to measure blood flow, but how does the dye help?
2 Answers
The nuclear medicine spreads to the entire body including the heart and allows us to image the heart to see if the patient has a blockage. The effect of it last 24 hours.
A nuclear stress test uses a small amount of a radioactive substance that is similar to potassium that is normally taken up into cardiac muscle. It doesn’t measure blood flow directly, but looks at the heart muscle supplied by a particular coronary artery to determine whether you have a blockage in that vessel. It’s a non-invasive way of determining if you have a significant, flow-obstructing blockage in a coronary artery by looking at the heart muscle supplied by the coronary arteries.
