Third of heart scans are useless

One in three heart scans fail, and don’t produce clear results that heart specialists can use, a new review has concluded.

More than one in three heart ultrasounds are either unclear or completely non‑diagnostic, forcing doctors to repeat tests or send patients for more invasive, and expensive, follow‑up scans, say researchers at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

Worryingly, the most vulnerable patients are likely to experience a failed scan.  The researchers analysed data from more than 70,000 heart patients, and failed scans are more likely to happen in patients with lung failure, heart disease or have irregular heart rhythms.

Ultrasound heart scans, known as echocardiograms (ECGs), are one of the most common tests in medicine, and yet they are unreliable because they don’t produce clear images.

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