Noninvasive hemodynamic study of the pulmonary circulation.

UNLABELLED Cardiac catheterization is the reference method for the hemodynamic study of the pulmonary circulation. However, cardiac catheterization is an expensive and invasive method. Echocardiography is a reliable noninvasive alternative method. The purpose of our study was to determine the correlation between echocardiographic and haemodynamic data obtained by cardiac catheterization in patients with pulmonary hypertension. MATERIAL AND METHODS We conducted a prospective study on 55 subjects diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension. They were examined by echocardiography and cardiac catheterization. The following parameters were measured: systolic, mean and diastolic pulmonary artery pressure and pulmonary vascular resistance. We determined the coefficient of linear correlation (Pearson) between the two methods. RESULTS The mean pulmonary artery pressure obtained by cardiac catheterization was 48.82 +/- 18.4 mm Hg; the systolic pulmonary artery pressure at cardiac catheterization was 67.86 +/- 22.31 mm Hg; the diastolic pulmonary artery pressure was 32.85 +/- 15.49 mm Hg; the pulmonary resistance was 10.4 +/- 5.14 Wood units. We obtained very good correlation between the two methods for systolic pulmonary artery pressure (r 0.847, p < 0.0001), mean pulmonary artery pressure (r 0.7, p < 0.001), diastolic pulmonary artery pressure (r 0.54, p 0.01) and pulmonary vascular resistance (r 0.82, p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS Echocardiography is an excellent method for the hemodynamic study of the pulmonary circulation.