OBJECTIVES To describe the characteristics of patients in Hong Kong with or at risk of atherothrombosis, to determine the proportion of symptomatic patients with more than one vascular bed affected, and to assess the relationship between ankle brachial index and disease severity. DESIGN Local participation in an international prevalence study. SETTING Five centres in Hong Kong. PARTICIPAN...

BACKGROUND Central obesity is associated with peripheral arterial disease, suggesting that ectopic fat depots may be associated with localized diseases of the aorta and lower-extremity arteries. We hypothesized that persons with greater amounts of periaortic fat are more likely to have clinical PAD and a low ankle-brachial index. METHODS AND RESULTS We quantified periaortic fat surrounding th...

Background—Central obesity is associated with peripheral arterial disease, suggesting that ectopic fat depots may be associated with localized diseases of the aorta and lower-extremity arteries. We hypothesized that persons with greater amounts of periaortic fat are more likely to have clinical PAD and a low ankle-brachial index. Methods and Results—We quantified periaortic fat surrounding the ...

We evaluated the endothelial function of patients with Buerger disease using peripheral arterial tonometry test, and examined the factors that are significantly correlated with the endothelial dysfunction in these patients. We performed the peripheral arterial tonometry test in 22 patients with Buerger disease. We recorded the patients' characteristics, including ankle brachial pressure index a...

OBJECTIVE To clarify whether stiffness and impaired blood flow in lower-leg arteries are associated with severity of coronary artery calcification among asymptomatic diabetic patients. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We enrolled 102 asymptomatic type 2 diabetic patients with no history of cardiovascular complications consecutively admitted to our hospital. Agatston coronary artery calcium (CAC) s...

OBJECTIVES We aimed to determine the relationship between carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) and brachial artery flow-mediated dilation (FMD) in healthy middle-age men. BACKGROUND Carotid IMT and brachial artery FMD are frequently used as surrogate measures of subclinical atherosclerosis. Whereas carotid IMT identifies early structural abnormalities, brachial artery FMD, considered a bioass...

Systolic time interval (STI) is an established noninvasive technique for the assessment of cardiac function. Brachial STIs can be automatically determined by an ankle-brachial index (ABI)-form device. The aims of this study are to evaluate whether the STIs measured from ABI-form device can represent those measured from echocardiography and to compare the diagnostic values of brachial and echoca...