Does high-frequency echocardiography accurately measure left ventricular mass in normal and hypertrophied rat models compared to direct anatomic measurement?
High-frequency echocardiography provides an accurate and highly reproducible non-invasive method for determining left ventricular mass in normal and hypertrophied rat models.
A high-frequency transducer was used to determine the optimal parameters for visualizing the heart in 40 normal Wistar, 15 SHR, and 10 aorta-banded rats. The rats were 5 to 30 weeks old and weighed between 105 and 705 grams. Two-dimensional and M-mode views of the ventricles, atria, valves, and great arteries were obtained by placing the transducer beneath the rats through the left or right parasternal window in either the prone or the right decubitus positions, respectively. Left ventricular (LV) mass was determined on the basis of a spheroid model; these values correlated well with the LV weight for both the Wistar rats (r = 0.94, p less than 0.001) and the rats with cardiac hypertrophy due to pressure load (r = 0.87, p less than 0.001). These results were highly reproducible. This indicates that echocardiography is useful for obtaining quantitative measurements in rats.
Nakamura et al. (Tue,) studied this question.
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