Chest pain and angina pectoris – or the ugly swan and the beautiful duckling

The original description of Heberden’s angina pectoris is put forward to stress the importance of proper history-taking in identifying patients. In a marketdriven approach to improve cost-effectiveness in healthcare, angina pectoris as an entity seems stripped to its bare minimum: chest and pain. The diagnostic yield of exercise testing, however, depends on the pretest likelihood of disease and therefore knowledge of its clinical utility and pitfalls is essential to refine an initial and subjective diagnosis based on anamnesis. Nowadays chest pain units attempt to improve diagnostic accuracy by submitting all sorts of patients to the (stress) test. In the end protocol-driven policies like these may very well prove to be contraproductive when fundamentals are ignored. (Neth Heart J 2010;18:561–4.)