BACKGROUND The merits of retaining the subvalvular apparatus during mitral valve replacement for chronic mitral regurgitation have been demonstrated in numerous clinical and laboratory investigations. In this preliminary report, we analyzed the early effects of complete versus partial chordal preservation on left ventricular mechanics. METHODS AND RESULTS Fifty patients undergoing isolated su...

BACKGROUND Patients with aortic stenosis have a period of compensated left ventricular hypertrophy but may eventually develop congestive heart failure. Previous experimental studies showed either normal myocardial contractility in mild short-term pressure overload or myocardial dysfunction with severe pressure overload. Transition from compensated left ventricular hypertrophy to myocardial dysf...

The purpose of this study was to induce myocardial infarction (MI) and compare the echocardiographic parameters and mortality ratio of Lewis inbred and Wistar outbred strain before and after the procedure to help choose the best one for MI studies. In this study MI was induced in 46 Lewis and 34 Wistar by occlusion of left anterior descending artery (LAD). Doppler, two-dimensional (2-D) and 2-D...

OBJECTIVES Myocardial cell injury may contribute to cardiac dysfunction in septic shock. Troponin I is a biochemical marker of myocardial cell injury and death. We hypothesized that troponin I is increased in pediatric patients with septic shock and correlates with cardiac dysfunction and disease severity. DESIGN Prospective, observational study. SETTING Children's medical center. PATIENT...

Background. Patients with aortic stenosis have a period of compensated left ventricular hypertrophy but may eventually develop congestive heart failure. Previous experimental studies showed either normal myocardial contractility in mild short-term pressure overload or myocardial dysfunction with severe pressure overload. Transition from compensated left ventricular hypertrophy to myocardial dys...

a fixed plane and fail to compensate for through-plane motion. The shortening of the left ventricle along its long axis during systole results in planar images of two different levels of the ventricle, leading to error in any derived functional measurements. LV systolic long-axis motion was measured in 19 normal volunteers using MRI. Methods and Results. With a selective radio frequency (RF) ti...

BACKGROUND Conventional echocardiographic technique for assessment of volume status and cardiac contractility utilizes left ventricular end-diastolic area (LVEDA) and fractional area of change (FAC), respectively. Our goal was to find a technically reliable yet faster technique to evaluate volume status and contractility by measuring left ventricular end-diastolic diameter (LVEDD) and fractiona...

Postsystolic shortening and thickening of ischemic and postischemic myocardium are well-recognized phenomena, but their significance is controversial. To discover whether postsystolic shortening and thickening might represent an active process and to establish their place as possible predictors of functional recovery during and after recovery from ischemia, we examined correlations in severely ...

OBJECTIVES This study sought to evaluate myocardial contraction fraction (MCF) as an index of myocardial shortening by comparison to conventional shortening indices in patients with hypertensive hypertrophy, athletes with physiologic hypertrophy and sedentary normal adult subjects. BACKGROUND A significant percentage of patients with hypertensive hypertrophy have "normal" or "preserved" left ...

In six open-chest, anesthetized dogs, segmental shortening was measured with one pair of ultrasonic dimension gauges placed in the subendocardium (used as a marker for regional ischemia) and two pairs in the epicardium. One of the epicardial crystal pairs was aligned parallel with the surface fibers and the other was oriented circumferentially, parallel with the short axis. During control condi...