ACC/AHA 2002 Guideline Update for Exercise Testing: Summary Article

The American College of Cardiology (ACC)/American Heart Association (AHA) Task Force on Practice Guidelines regularly reviews existing guidelines to determine when an update or full revision is needed. This process gives priority to areas where major changes in text, and particularly recommendations, are mentioned on the basis of new understanding or evidence. Minor changes in verbiage and references are discouraged. The ACC/AHA guidelines for exercise testing that were published in 1997 have now been updated. The full-text guidelines incorporating the updated material are available on the Internet (www.acc.org or www.americanheart.org) in both a version that shows the changes in the 1997 guidelines in strike-over (deleted text) and highlighting (new text) and a “clean” version that fully incorporates the changes. This article describes the 10 major areas of change reflected in the update in a format that we hope can be read and understood as a stand-alone document. The table of contents from the full-length guideline (see next page) indicates the location of these changes. Interested readers are referred to the full-length Internet version to completely understand the context of these changes. All new references appear in boldface type; all original references appear in normal type.⇓ View this table: Table of Contents The ACC/AHA classifications, I, II, and III are used to summarize indications as follows: Class I: Conditions for which there is evidence and/or general agreement that a given procedure or treatment is useful and effective. Class II: Conditions for which there is conflicting evidence and/or a divergence of opinion about the usefulness/efficacy of a procedure or treatment. IIa: Weight of evidence/opinion is in favor of usefulness/efficacy. IIb: Usefulness/efficacy is less well established by evidence/opinion. Class III: Conditions for which there is evidence and/or general agreement that the procedure/treatment is not useful/effective and in some cases may be harmful. In the original …