Background: New techniques of Tissue Doppler Imaging (TDI) enable the measurement of myocardial velocities and provide information about left ventricular (LV) diastolic function. Recent studies explored the prognostic role of TDI-derived indexes. However, these studies considered only total mortality and did not provide information on cardiovascular mortality and morbidity. Therefore, we investigated in continuous and categorical analyses whether Doppler diastolic indexes contained any prognostic information over and beyond traditional cardiovascular risk factors in a general population.
Methods and results: We measured early and late diastolic peak velocities of mitral inflow (E and A) by conventional Doppler, and the mitral annular velocities (e' and a') by TDI in 793 participants (mean age 50.9 years). We calculated multivariable-adjusted hazard ratios for conventional and TDI Doppler indexes, while accounting for family cluster and cardiovascular risk factors. Median follow-up was 4.8 years (5th to 95th percentile, 3.0 to 5.4). With adjustments applied for covariables, e' velocity was a significant predictor of fatal and nonfatal cardiovascular (n=59; P=0.004) and cardiac events (n=40; P=0.001). TDI e' yielded a net reclassification improvement of 54.2% for cardiovascular and 64.0% for cardiac events. Hazard ratios of all cardiovascular (2.21; P=0.042) and cardiac (4.50; P=0.002) events were significantly elevated in participants with increased LV filling pressure compared with subjects with normal diastolic function.
Conclusions: TDI e' velocity is a significant predictor of fatal and nonfatal cardiovascular events in a general population. Furthermore, we observed an increase in all cardiovascular events in the diastolic dysfunction group characterized by elevated LV filling pressure.
Keywords: diastole; echocardiography; epidemiology; survival; tissue Doppler imaging.