Exercise echocardiography can unmask right ventricular dysfunction in patients with isolated RV dilation, a rare finding associated with high long-term mortality primarily due to respiratory causes like pulmonary thromboembolism.
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May support exercise echocardiography to unmask RV dysfunction in isolated dilation; leaves open whether testing alters high respiratory mortality.
Objective: Symptoms may be similar in patients with heart or lung disease. Thus, patients with lung disease are occasionally referred for evaluation by exercise echocardiography (ExE). We aimed to study the clinical, ExE data and outcome of patients with right ventricular (RV) dilation not explained by left ventricular (LV) heart disease. Methods: Retrospective analysis of RV dysfunctional data in absence of LV heart disease in patients submitted to an ExE. Results: Data on RV dilation in absence of LV heart disease were found in 21 of 18,400 ExE studies (0.11%). In 4 of the 21 patients (19%) RV function and systolic pulmonary artery pressure were normal at rest. However, exercise induced RV dysfunction and/or elevated systolic pulmonary artery pressure in all of these 4 patients. During follow-up of 5.2 ± 5.7 years 11 patients died (52%), most of them of respiratory causes (73%), being pulmonary thromboembolism (PTE) (38%) the most frequent final diagnosis. Conclusion: RV dysfunction in absence of LV disease is rare among patients referred for ExE. ExE is of value as sometimes abnormalities on RV function arise only with exercise
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Peteiro et al. (2017) studied this question.
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