Welcome to Dr Warrick's Podcast Channel. Warrick is a practising cardiologist and author with a passion for improving care by helping patients understand their heart health through education work believes educated patients get the best health care to discover and understand the latest approaches and technology in heart care and how this might apply to you or someone you love.

Hi, my name's Dr Warrick Bishop and welcome to my Healthy Heart Minute, and today I'd like to just touch on some of our more specific tests that we use in the setting of cardiac failure.

Well, once we've taken history and an examination and we're suspicious that the heart has a problem, probably our main go-to test is an ultrasound of the heart or an echocardiogram. This is the technology we use to look at unborn babies in a mother's uterus. The ultrasound gives this magnificent pictures of the structure and function of the heart and gives us a clear idea on how well the heart is contracting or squeezing. It also allows us to measure some pressures and look at other aspects that could be contributory to the cardiac failure.

We also do some blood tests and we do a very specific blood test called a brain natriuretic peptide, and you don't need to remember that. But what you might want to remember is when the heart is under strain, it releases a particular chemical, which is a brain natriuretic peptide, and that particular chemical tells us that the heart is under duress, and so we can use that as part of our investigative process.

Well, I've done a whole podcast on how we investigate cardiac failure. The link to that is below. If you're interested, please have a listen and check it out. For now, however, wis you the very best. Take care and goodbye.

LISTEN TO THE FULL PODCAST BY CLICKING HERE 

Make sure you share and give us a 5 Star Review if you liked our show.

Join The Healthy Heart Network