The supine and erect arterial blood pressure and pulse rate were measured in 13 patients with Parkinson's disease, chronically treated with levodopa and peripheral decarboxilase inhibitors presenting with or without On-Off phenomenon (end-of-dose akinesia). In the patients with dose-related response fluctuations the mean systo-diastolic blood pressure, both supine and erect, was found significa...

background: early diagnosis of left ventricular mass (lvm) inappropriateness and left ventricular hypertrophy   (lvh) can result in preventing diastolic left ventricular dysfunction and its related morbidity and mortality. this study was performed to determine if diastolic dysfunction   is associated with lvh and inappropriate lvm. methods: one hundred   and twenty five uncomplicated hypertensi...

A questionnaire about detecting and managing hypertension was answered by 76 out of 110 (69%) doctors and 116 out of 195 (63%) qualified nurses in a large hospital. There was no general agreement on the method of taking diastolic blood pressures or on the level of hypertension requiring treatment. Most of the clinicians treated mild hypertension, although no proof exists that such treatment is ...

Background A growing body of data has demonstrated a direct relationship between epicardial fat volume(EFV) and cardiovascular diseases. In fact, EFV has been shown to be an independent predictor of coronary atherosclerosis and atrial fibrillation. Currently, there is no standard protocol for assessing EFV using cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR). Quantification of peri-ventricular EFV ut...

Introduction In approx. 50% of cases, heart failure is caused by an isolated diastolic dysfunction (DD) in the presence of a preserved systolic function but with comparably devastating outcome. Among others, echocardiography (EC) categorized DD mainly according to early (E-wave) and late (A-wave) diastolic mitral blood flow (MBF) as well as tissue-doppler imaging (TDI) showing characteristic S`...

Background Cardiac MR (CMR) is the accepted gold standard for the assessment of myocardial scar and biventricular systolic function. Bright blood cine imaging with phase-contrast mitral inflow assessment has shown promise for the evaluation of left ventricular (LV) diastology. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the accuracy of LV diastolic function grading by CMR, using Doppler echocardio...

Background One-directionally-encoded cine 2D Phase-Contrast MRI (PC MRI) of basal short axial image is generally used for the evaluation of diastolic function, but has potential limitations due to the longitudinal cardiac motion and inflow direction. Time-resolved 3D PC MRI is not affected by the flow direction and left ventricular motion, however, requires long acquisition time. In theory, thr...