BACKGROUND Chagas' disease may cause left ventricular diastolic dysfunction and its early detection in asymptomatic patients would allow to stratify the risk and to optimize medical treatment. The aim of this study is to investigate if transmitral Doppler flow can detect early abnormalities of the diastolic left ventricular function in patients during the indeterminate phase of Chagas' disease,...

Introduction In echocardiography (EC), classification of diastolic dysfunction (DD) is widely accepted and mainly assessed using three criteria (figure1): mitral blood flow (MBF, E-A-curve), lateral wall velocity (LWV, S-E`-A`-curve) and pulmonary vein flow (PVF, S-D-AR-curve). With these three characteristic flow and velocity patterns and their ratios E/A, E/E ́ and S/D, regular diastolic funct...

OBJECTIVE To investigate cross-sectional associations among blood pressures (BPs), arterial stiffness, and open-angle glaucoma (OAG). METHODS Study participants came from the population-based Rotterdam Study. The baseline examination phase took place after an extensive home interview from March 20, 1990, to June 17, 1993, and the third phase between March 19, 1997, and December 16, 1999. Case...

Left ventricular diastolic function was studied in 11 patients with coronary artery disease. Single plane ventriculography (30 degrees right anterior oblique projection) was performed at rest and during an episode of angina immediately after a period of rapid atrial pacing. Left ventricular pressure was recorded simultaneously by a micromanometer tipped catheter. The ventriculograms were digiti...

Introduction: Myocardial perfusion imaging using gated SPECT and phase analysis is an effective tool in evaluation of mechanical dyssynchrony. The purpose of this study was to determine the normal ranges of global and regional phase parameters. Methods: A total of 100 patients with normal resting and stress electrocardiograms, low pretest likelihood for c...

Diastolic heart failure is increasing in prevalence. Although the pathophysiology is incompletely understood and current therapeutic strategies are limited, identification of diastolic dysfunction is important. We review the role of contemporary techniques with echocardiography and cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI) in the assessment of diastolic dysfunction. Cardiac catheterization is t...

BACKGROUND Obesity is a chronic and multifactorial disease, associated with increased cardiovascular risk, especially diastolic heart failure. OBJECTIVE To evaluate left ventricular diastolic function in morbidly obese patients in the pre-operative for bariatric surgery, correlating it with cardiovascular risk factors and heart structure. METHODS This is a cross-sectional study with 132 pat...

recent studies have documented the importance of lipids and lipoproteins as determinants of serum total homocysteine concentrations in persons with myocardial infarction, and in healthy subjects. associations between various biological systems and total homocysteine have also been reported. however, some of these associations are poorly understood. the purpose of our study was to measure serum ...

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES Obesity is independently associated with left ventricular (LV) diastolic dysfunction and altered cardiac morphology. Morbidity and mortality in patients with diastolic dysfunction are similar to values observed in patients with systolic heart failure. We hypothesized that dysfunctional cardiac responses in people with obesity are reversible after weight loss. Thus, we stud...