Clinical determining factors of end diastolic pressure

Abstract

Introduction: many cardiovascular diseases may cause heart failure, because of impairment of systolic or diastolic function, or both. It is frequently observed that regardless of physiopathological processes that were presumed to cause major symptoms, some patients have normal or quite normal functional class of dyspnea. This observation is sometimes confirmed in the cath lab, when the measured end diastolic pressure (EDP) is normal.

Objective: to study which clinical factors are related with changes in EDP.

Methods: 200 patients were included in a sample of 1.730 patients studied in the Cath Lab during 2005. This retrospective, descriptive and analytic study seeked for association between EDP and independent variables such as: age, sex gender, weight, clinical risk factor for coronary artery disease, the clinical presentation, ejection fraction (EF) measured, structural changes in left ventricle morphology (dilatation or hypertrophy), extent of coronary disease (one, two or three-vessel disease, normal coronaries, or reduced intracoronary flow), and the coronary artery involved. Statistically, a simple linear regression model was applied in the STATA 9 program.

Results: increasing variability in the EDP was found to be significantly related with: hypertension, dilated left ventricle, 3-vessel disease, left coronary descendant and right coronary artery involvement. Decreasing variability of EDP presented with increasing EF and normal coronary arteries.

Conclusions: some clinical factors were confirmed as related with altered EDP, but others, such as the more unstable clinical conditions and hypertrophy, surprisingly showed no significant relation with EDP variations. This investigation offers new pathways to future clinical studies in this area.