As the incidence of angina and heart failure continue to rise, new therapeutic options will be needed to treat patients who remain symptomatic or who are intolerant to current treatment. Enhanced external counterpulsation (EECP) is a noninvasive modality being investigated in both angina and congestive heart failure patients. It has been proven to provide symptomatic benefit in angina patients,...

BACKGROUND Enhanced external counterpulsation (EECP) is a circulation assist device that may improve endothelial dysfunction by increasing shear stress. Chronic exposure of vascular endothelial cells and vascular smooth muscle cells to relatively high physiological shear stress has antiproliferative and vasoprotective effects. The present study hypothesizes that EECP inhibits intimal hyperplasi...

AIMS To examine if the skin microvascular bed is altered and can be modified by enhanced external counterpulsation (EECP) in patients with chronic refractory angina. METHODS Twenty patients diagnosed with refractory angina were divided into EECP (n = 10) or no EECP (n = 10) groups. The data were compared to matched healthy subjects (n = 20). The cutaneous forearm microvascular blood flow was ...

The development of advanced revascularization techniques has resulted in the growth of a subset of patients with coronary artery disease who are nonrevascularizable and are considered to have refractory angina. Enhanced external counterpulsation (EECP) has been developed for the management of these patients with chronic, refractory disease. Evidence has shown that through improvement of vascula...

background: enhanced external counterpulsation (eecp) is a noninvasive technique used for patients with refractory angina pectoris. there are controversial data on the effectiveness of eecp in improving patients with refractory stable angina. the aim of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of eecp for the treatment of patients with refractory angina pectoris. methods: ...

Enhanced external counterpulsation (EECP) is used to noninvasively treat refractory angina patients, including those with a history of heart failure. The International EECP Patient Registry was used to examine the benefit and safety of EECP treatment, including a 6-month follow-up, in 1,957 patients, 548 with a history of heart failure. The heart failure cohort was older, with more females, a g...

In a prospective study, enhanced external counterpulsation (EECP) was performed for 1 hour each day for 35 days in 47 patients, mean age 61 +/- 8 years, with prior coronary revascularization who had chronic refractory angina pectoris despite antianginal drugs and who were not candidates for further coronary revascularization. Compared with baseline values, EECP significantly improved anginal sy...

We studied the effect of enhanced external counterpulsation (EECP) in 23 consecutive patients with stable angina pectoris who had a positive dobutamine stress echocardiogram. After EECP, stress-induced wall motion score (WMS) improved by > or =2 grades in 43% of the patients (n = 10); the average improvement was 5.3 +/- 3.8 compared with -0.6 +/- 3.0 in the remaining 13 patients (p = 0.007). Th...

OBJECTIVES Intra-aortic counterpulsation is the most frequently used cardiac assist device. However, there are only few studies of the effects of counterpulsation on cerebral blood flow and these report conflicting outcomes. The new enhanced external counterpulsation (EECP) technique reproduces non-invasively the effects of intra-aortic counterpulsation. In this study, we evaluated effects of E...