Diagnosis of coronary artery disease by stress echocardiography and perfusion scintigraphy.
This meta-analysis was performed to compare the diagnostic efficacy of stress echocardiography (SE) and Stress perfusion studies (SPS) in detecting coronary artery disease (CAD). A meta-analysis of peer reviewed articles, published in English language, reporting head-to-head comparison of vasodilator stress echocardiography (VSE) and SPS for the diagnosis of CAD, was performed. Data of 13 studies comprising of 860 patients from 13 different institutions were analyzed. Algorithms were developed to generate raw data from published papers to calculate statistical parameters with confidence intervals and then compare them at specified significance levels. The overall diagnostic accuracy of the two tests was almost similar, 0.77 for VSE vs 0.8 for SPS (p=ns). SPS gave higher sensitivity, 0.88 vs 0.70 in cumulative data (p<0.0001) while VSE gave higher specificity, 0.90 vs 0.67 (p<0.0001). Accuracy of VSE with state-of-the-art protocols became even better than SPS (p<0.05). In hypertensive patients specificity of SPS was markedly deteriorated. Contrary to this, VSE gave higher specificity (0.90 vs 0.40) in this subgroup of patients as well. VSE might become an effective alternative of SPS where scintigraphy techniques are not available or affordable.
Imran
Muhammad Babar
MB
Department of Nuclear Medicine, Punjab Institute of Nuclear Medicine, Jail Road, Faisalabad, Pakistan. muhammadbabarimran@yahoo.com
Khan
Muhammad Aleem
MA
Aslam
Muhammad Naseem
MN
Irfanullah
Javaid
J
D003324:Coronary Artery Disease / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D025401:Echocardiography, Stress / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D011877:Radionuclide Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D015899:Tomography, Emission-Computed, Single-Photon / Q000379:methods