BACKGROUND: The effect of prolonged strenuous exercise (PSE) on left ventricular (LV) systolic function has not been well studied in younger female triathletes. This study examined LV systolic function prior to, during and immediately following PSE (i.e., 40 km bicycle time trial followed by a 10 km run) in 13 younger (29 PlusMinus; 6 years) female triathletes. METHODS: Two-dimensional echocard...

Background Right ventricular-pulmonary arterial coupling plays an important role in the occurrence of right ventricular failure. Ventricular-arterial coupling is defined as Ea/ Emax. Ea is the effective arterial elastance and an index of the post-load, and includes vascular resistances, vessel compliance, vascular impedance, systolic and diastolic time intervals. Ea = (arterial end-systolic pre...

The left ventricular end-systolic pressure-volume relationship is a load-insensitive measure of left ventricular performance. The relationship at end-systole between left ventricular pressure and dimension is more easily obtained, but the conflicting results of previous studies make it unclear if it has the same properties as the left ventricular end-systolic pressure-volume relationship. To ad...

The value for the slope of the left ventricular (LV) end-systolic pressure-dimension and pressure-volume relations has been proposed as a quantitative measure of the LV inotropic state. This measure of LV inotropic state is attractive because it is independent of preload and incorporates afterload. To investigate the sensitivity of the slope of these relations to alterations in contractile stat...

to evaluate the prognostic significance of clinicopathological measurement in the diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction (mi) in sheep, acute mi was induced by ligation of left anterior descending coronary artery (lad). for this purpose, twenty four healthy sheep were divided into the sham-operated or control group (group i, thoracotomy without mi) and the experimental group (group ii, with m...

Background: Hypertension is the third risk factor for the cardiovascular diseases. This study investigated the effects of mineral water from Damavand spring on the blood pressure and serum lipid profiles in men with hypertension. Methods: In this study 41 hypertensive men were randomly assigned to Damavand mineral water (DM) and Tehran water groups (TW). The DM and TW received 1.5-liter bottle ...

Cardiac morphogenesis and function are interrelated during cardiovascular development. We evaluated the effects of acute alteration of loading condition to chick embryonic ventricular contractility using end-systolic myocardial stiffness based on the incremental elastic modulus concept. End-systolic stress-strain relations including geometric factor and end-systolic myocardial stiffness were de...