Stress Echocardiography: a Historical Perspective

Abstract

This brief history of stress echocardiography presents a good opportunity to trace an intellectual journey, to pay credit to the pioneers of the technique, and to establish a cultural framework for future developments. As happens with any scientific innovation, stress echocardiography completed its life cycle by moving from the status of a “promising innovation”, used by a few enthusiastic supporters amid general skepticism, up to the rank of an “established technology” accepted by virtually the whole cardiological community (Fig. 1) — sometimes even overused, with an embarassing lack of common sense tending to transform the technique into a totem — whose responses, taken out of the overall clinical context, may produce more problems than solutions in patient management. The increased acceptance of stress echocardiography by cardiologists is testified to by the exponential growth of the space devoted to it in major journals and at meetings (Fig. 2), but it was not always all roses.

The truth is not in a dream of one person, but in the dreams of many

from Thousand and one nights