Echocardiographic Evaluation of Indices of Right Ventricle Dysfunction in Pulmonary Hypertension

Introduction: Echocardiography is usually the first modalities of imaging to evaluate the structural and functional disorders of the heart and great vessels, and colored flow and Doppler images are able to perform hemodynamic and bloodstream evaluations. The goal of this study was the investigation of right ventricular function using echocardiography in patients with pulmonary artery hypertension. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, the study population included all the patients with pulmonary artery hypertension for any reason, and their diagnoses using echocardiography and measurement of pulmonary artery pressure were confirmed, which were higher than 25. The number of samples was 80 and patients underwent echocardiography with two-dimensional and tissue doppler imaging. Data were analyzed using SPSS software version 16 and Chi-squared test, Pearson’s correlation coefficient and t-test. The significance level was considered less than 0.05. Results: The results of statistical tests showed that the means of FAC, TAPSE, and TIE indexes in the group with PVR less than 2 were significantly higher than the means of FAC (P = 0.006), TAPSE (P = 0.04), and TIE (P = 0.01) indexes in the group with more PVR, and were equal to 2 in this study. Also, the differences between the mean of normal and abnormal values of FAC, SWAVE, and TIE indexes in patients with normal PVR were not significant, while these differences were significant in patients with abnormal PVRs. Conclusion: In echocardiography investigations of right ventricular function in patients with pulmonary artery hypertension, the values obtained from FAC, SWAVE and TIE indexes and TAPSE had high diagnostic confidences in these patients. Therefore, these items were disturbed as a result of increase in the degree of resistance of pulmonary bed, and were good criteria to evaluate the right ventricular function in these patients. In the meantime, FAC values were more sensitive to the abnormal values of PVR due to the high frequency of its abnormal values in the range of abnormal PVR, and it was a good criterion to evaluate the right ventricular function in patients with pulmonary artery hypertension.