Noninvasive assessment of endothelial function, including peripheral arterial tonometry, may play a central role in treatment evaluation and prognostic stratification in cardiovascular disease.
Should not yet change CVD practice; literature review leaves routine endothelial assessment open pending prospective data.
The combination of risk stratification by assessment of conventional risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD) with not only a morphological assessment of vascular damage (such as carotid ultrasound examination) but also vascular function tests may be a useful strategy for the management of CVD and its related risk factors. Endothelial dysfunction is present in a great variety of pathological conditions: it is considered the first alteration of vascular function in atherosclerosis and one of the phenomena involved in the progression of heart failure. Assessing endothelial function with noninvasive methods could have a central role for evaluation of treatment, prognostic stratification, and pharmacological studies in CVD. In this review, we focus on noninvasive techniques that have recently become available to assess endothelial function and express the possible clinical role in different clinical settings.
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Vizzardi et al. (2014) studied this question.
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