OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to determine if left ventricular preload, afterload or contractility is a correlate of left ventricular mass index in hypertensive pediatric patients. BACKGROUND It is believed that decreased contractility and increased preload are associated with left ventricular hypertrophy in adult hypertensive patients. METHODS Ninety pediatric hypertensive patients ...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to identify echocardiographic parameters that allow distinguishing different levels of cardiac dysfunction in aortic banded rats. METHODS Wistar male rats (90-100 g) were subjected to aortic banding (n=23) or a sham operation (n=12). The following echocardiographic parameters were evaluated and used to group rats into groups with similar characteristics...

Sodium pentobarbital (PB), 30 mg/kg, iv, was administered to 30 conscious dogs instrumented for measurement of cardiac output and regional blood flow distribution, left ventricular (LV) diameter, LV pressure, dP/dt, and dD/dt, i.e., velocity of myocardial fiber shortening. Ventilation was controlled during anesthesia to maintain arterial blood gases at control values for conscious dogs. The ane...

Postextrasystolic potentiation was studied during control and 5 minutes after coronary occlusion in epicardial regions of 12 open-chest dogs. Segmental behavior evaluated with ultrasonic crystals was correlated with regional myocardial blood flow (MBF) measured with radioactive microspheres. A similar correlation was found between the percentage of systolic shortening in postextrasystolic beats...

The importance of the loss of ovarian function to the progression of hypertension and heart disease in women is controversial. We investigated whether ovariectomy would accelerate development of hypertension, congestive heart failure, and neurohumoral activation in adult spontaneous hypertension heart failure (SHHF) rats, a genetic model of heart failure. Six months after ovariectomy, no signif...

Background—Whether diabetes mellitus (DM) adversely affects left ventricular (LV) structure and function independently of increases in body mass index (BMI) and blood pressure is controversial. Methods and Results—Echocardiography was used in the Strong Heart Study, a study of cardiovascular disease in American Indians, to compare LV measurements between 1810 participants with DM and 944 with n...

AIMS It remains to be proven whether left ventricular (LV) peak systolic velocity indices (peak systolic annulus tissue velocities, ejection velocity, and strain rate) are more closely related to contraction than LV end-systolic echocardiographic indices (ejection fraction, fractional shortening, systolic annulus displacement, global strain, and ejection velocity time integral). The study aimed...

Reproducible left ventricular dimensions were found by M-mode echocardiography in eight healthy men in the semisupine position during two maximal bicycle exercise tests, performed with four hours interval. Left ventricular end-diastolic dimension did not increase during maximal exercise, while fractional shortening increased by a decrease in end-systolic dimension. Twelve men studied by the sam...

Tissue Doppler Echocardiography was introduced in the 1960s (Yoshida et al., 1961), and enabled the quantitative assessment of myocardial motion and deformation. The wide use of tissue Doppler as a research tool halted, however, until the early 1990s (Hatle & Sutherland, 2000). Tissue Doppler is now available for high frame rates, wide sector angles and in combination with 2-dimiensional data a...

AIMS The present study was attempted to determine whether LV midwall mechanics yielded different conclusions about LV systolic function than the assessment of endocardial LV mechanics by echocardiography in spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR). METHODS AND RESULTS Thirty-six (18 Wistar normotensive (W), 18 [SHR]) anesthetized rats were studied with two-dimensional directed M-mode echocardiog...