Detection of early cardiac dysfunction in patients with Beta thalassemia by tissue Doppler echocardiography.

Backgrounds: In this study we tried to evaluate the prognostic significance of several echocardiographic parameters on the occurrence of heart failure or arrhythmias in patients with beta thalassemia.
Methods: We investigated possible differences in myocardial function between a population of 37 asymptomatic patients with beta thalassemia and 25 age-matched healthy controls, all of whom underwent an echocardiographic study, including tissue Doppler imaging (TDI), moreover plasmatic levels of N-terminal pro-BNP (NT-pro BNP) were measured in all patients. We followed the patients for 22 ± 8 months to evaluate adverse cardiac events.
Results: Conventional echocardiographic parameters of left ventricle were comparable in both groups. Whereas TDI peak systolic velocity (Sm) and diastolic parameter (E/Em ratio) were significantly abnormal in patients with thalassemia. Moreover eleven adverse cardiac events were observed during follow-up. Baseline systolic velocity (Sm) <7.9 cm/s was significantly associated with cardiac complications (P < 0.05). We also demonstrated that systolic velocity is inversely related to NT-proBNP plasmatic levels (P < 0.001).
Conclusions: Our study suggests that mitral annular systolic velocity <7.9 cm/s is associated to the onset of adverse cardiac events.
(© 2010, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)