The functional border zone in conscious dogs.

Studies focusing on the functional border zone have been performed largely with anesthetized, open-chest preparations. Therefore, we instrumented 14 dogs at sterile surgery with sonomicrometers arrayed to measure systolic wall thickening across the perfusion boundary produced by circumflex coronary occlusion. We fitted sigmoid curves to the data to model the distribution of wall thickening impairment as a function of distance from the perfusion boundary, which was delineated with myocardial blood flow (15 micron diameter microspheres) maps. Using this approach, we defined the functional border zone as the distance from the perfusion boundary to 97.5% of the sigmoid curve's nonischemic asymptote. The lateral extent of the functional border zone, measured 10 min and 3 hr after occlusion, was 32 and 28 degrees of circumference, respectively. To evaluate the severity of nonischemic dysfunction, we measured average systolic wall thickening within the functional border zone. It was reduced from 3.69 +/- 1.10 (mean +/- SD) mm to 2.98 +/- 1.07 mm (p less than .01) and 2.74 +/- 1.12 mm (p less than .01) early and late after coronary occlusion. Thus, a narrow functional border zone was evident during circumflex coronary occlusion in conscious dogs. Its lateral extent was limited to approximately 30 degrees (similar to findings in open-chest, anesthetized dogs), severe dysfunction was restricted to the immediate vicinity of the perfusion boundary, and the average severity of nonischemic dysfunction within the functional border zone was mild.