Your heart is the most important muscle in your body but the most difficult to monitor. You can exercise your arms and watch the muscles grow, but you have no idea whether your heart is in good shape. Luckily, ECGs (sometimes called EKGs) can track your heart activity to aid in preventative care. They can …
Life can be stressful. Yes, that’s true even here on the placid Central California coast. Stress is one of the risk factors for heart attacks and stroke, as stress often leads to high blood pressure. But stress is also necessary for seeing how a patient’s heart is really functioning. It gives a picture of the …
Too Much Stress Can Lead to a Stress Echocardiogram Read More »
When examining your heart, Dr. Stevens uses various diagnostic tools. An important one is called the ejection fraction, and it refers to the amount, or percentage, of blood that is pumped out of the ventricles with each contraction. Here’s some more information about the ejection fraction. How it works With each heartbeat, your heart squeezes …
If you’ve ever read any Edgar Allan Poe, odds are you’ve read the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” about a crazed man who kills an old neighbor because he couldn’t stand the man’s pale blue eye. But then he thinks he can hear the old man’s heart beating, which eventually makes him confess to the …
