Heart desea

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Many tests and examinations are used for diagnosing heart failure. Their accuracy tends to vary, echocardiography representing the gold standard. The Valsalva maneuver involves an easy-to-perform test for assessing the cardiac ejection fraction. The present study investigated the power of the Valsalva test in patients who received an echocardiography for various indications. A total of 153 patients were examined, some recruited from private practices, some from different hospitals. An echocardiographically measured left-ventricular ejection fraction of 45% was set as the limit value...

Dual chamber pacemakers are increasingly implanted to achieve optimal hemodynamics by AV synchrony, but the effect of AV delay programming on the patient's quality-of-life has been less well studied. The influence of an individually programmed AV delay between 100 and 250 ms on quality-of-life was investigated in a randomized, double-blind crossover study of 13 patients (69 +/- 10 years of age) with dual chamber pacemakers implanted because of high degree AV block. During radionuclide ventriculography at rest, the "optimal AV delay" with the maximal left ventricular ejection fraction and the "most unfavorable AV delay" with the least ejection fraction were determined...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.