It is generally accepted that the current guidelines for the primary prevention of sudden arrhythmic death, which are based on ejection fraction, do not allow the optimal selection of patients with low left ventricular ejection fraction of ischemic and nonischemic etiology for implantation of a cardioverter-defibrillator. Ejection fraction alone is limited in both sensitivity and specificity. A...

OBJECTIVE To study the pre-operative level of left ventricular ejection fraction that may be indicative of an increased risk of early and late mortality and of recurrent angina pectoris and late non-fatal myocardial infarction. MATERIAL AND METHODS A total of 934 patients with known left ventricular ejection fraction, 80 women and 854 men, were submitted to coronary artery bypass grafting at ...

The application of balloon aortic valvuloplasty to elderly patients with severe aortic stenosis and a low ventricular ejection fraction is undefined. Balloon aortic valvuloplasty was performed in a subset of 28 patients with low left ventricular ejection fraction (37 +/- 11%), severe aortic stenosis, and a mean age of 79 +/- 5 years. After valvuloplasty, significant increases were seen in aorti...

Introduction:  In patients who underwent surgery to repair Tetralogy of Fallot, right ventricular dilation from pulmonary regurgitation may be result in right ventricular failure, arrhythmias and cardiac arrest. Hence, pulmonary valve replacement may be necessary to reduce right ventricular volume overload. The aim of present study was to assess the effects of pulmonary valve replacement on rig...

BACKGROUND Left ventricular ejection fraction remains the primary risk stratification tool used in the selection of patients for implantable cardioverter defibrillator therapy. However, this solitary marker fails to identify a substantial portion of patients experiencing sudden cardiac arrest. In this study, we examined the incremental value of considering right ventricular ejection fraction fo...

introduction: the correlation between right and left ventricular ejection fractions (rvef and lvef, respectively) has been studied in only a small number of patients with a marked decrease in rvef and lvef. the aim of the present study was to compare lvef and rvef in patients with ischemic heart disease. rvef and lvef were measured by cardiovascular magnetic resonance (cmr) imaging. materials a...

AIMS Previous studies have compared the accuracy of various tests of viability for the prediction of recovery of regional left ventricular function; global left ventricular recovery has been less well studied, although it has important prognostic and functional ramifications. We sought to identify the relative contribution of ischaemia, regional and global contractile reserve, perfusion and met...

OBJECTIVE To assess independent determinants of beat to beat variation in left ventricular performance during atrial fibrillation. DESIGN Prospective study. SETTING University hospital. PATIENTS Seven patients with chronic non-valvar atrial fibrillation. INTERVENTIONS Invasive and non-invasive haemodynamic variables were assessed using a non-imaging computerised nuclear probe, a balloon...

Valvular aortic stenosis (AS) is the most frequent valvular disease in developed countries. Treatment decisions in AS are mainly based upon the symptomatic status of the patient and the severity of AS. Doppler echocardiography represents the standard tool for detecting and assessing the severity of the disease. Under the same denomination of severe AS [aortic valve area (AVA) < 1 cm(2)], severa...