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What Should I Ask My Doctor about Heart Disease?

What Should I Ask My Doctor about Heart Disease? (1:13)

Heart disease is about numbers. In this video, Mary Ann McLaughlin, MD, medical director of the Cardiac Health Program at The Mount Sinai Medical Center, discusses what tests and numbers you should ask about if you're diagnosed with heart disease.

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So if you're diagnosed with heart disease, you need to ask your physician about blood tests, you need to know your numbers, you need to know what is your cholesterol. What is the good cholesterol with the HDL with the lousy cholesterol of the LDL? What's your C-reactive protein? A C-reactive protein test is a marker for heart attack risk.

So you wouldn't know those right away. You also want to know, what is the next best test you should have to look at the function of your heart. Is it just an echocardiogram at last to look at your valves if you have a valve problem or are you having chest pain and you're worried about a heart attack, then you need to know what stress test you should have.

Should you just have a regular stress test with no imaging because your ECG is completely normal or should you go on for a stress test that adds an imaging component which gives us more information?