Research of Wall Thickness of Left and Right Ventricles in Patients with Arterial Hypertension Basing on Postmortem Examination

Arterial hypertension (AH) remains one of the most common diseases, cause of premature death and disability of patients. Heart is one of the main target organs in AH. The processes of cardiac remodeling in hypertension have been taken much attention recent years, as it is shown that left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease and sudden death [1-3]. Studying the processes of cardiac remodeling in hypertension is one of the important issues of modern cardiology [4-6]. Most researches of heart remodeling in AH are devoted to the study of the left ventricle. A number of studies [7-9] shows that at early stage of changes occur more in the right ventricle, and in patients with stage I or II significant signs of hypertrophy of the right half of the heart are detected early enough. The studies about cardiac remodeling in AH is mainly related to studies of changes in left ventricular (LV) and all received data are automatically interpolated to the right ventricle (RV). Analysis of long-term clinical experience has allowed A.L.Myasnikov in 1965 to conclude that some patients with AH signs of right heart failure advance the development of left ventricular failure; and in some patients with AH hypertrophy occurs not only in left but also in the right ventricle. However, nowadays there are few researches about the changes in RV in AH, because its study in the clinic represents significant methodological difficulties [10,11]. In this regard, the aim of our study was to study remodeling of the left and right ventricles of the heart in patients who died suffering from AH during the lifetime.