Comparison of Dipyridamole and exercise stress echocardiography for detection of coronary artery disease (a meta-analysis)

To assess the relative diagnostic accuracy of dipyridamole and exercise stress echocardiography, we performed a meta-analysis of peer-reviewed literature of published trials with "head-to-head" comparison on the same population of patients, who received high doses of dipyridamole (0.84 mg/kg over 10 minutes) versus exercise stress echocardiography. Dipyridamole and exercise stress echocardiography have similar diagnostic accuracy, with exercise stress echocardiography showing slightly superior sensitivity and dipyridamole echocardiography slightly superior specificity.