EDITORIALS
Ejection fraction: a measure of desperation?
International Centre for Circulatory Health, Imperial College and St Mary’s Hospital, London, UK
Correspondence to:
Dr C H Manisty, International Centre for Circulatory Health, 59–61 North Wharf Road, London W2 1LA, UK; cmanisty@ic.ac.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Ejection fraction is the most widely used measure of left ventricular systolic function, but why? It was initially adopted before the introduction of echocardiography, when ventricular function was assessed by ventriculography at cardiac catheterisation. To avoid the huge effort of calibrating ventriculographic volumes, ejection fraction was born as a quick way of quantifying function.
In this edition of Heart, MacIver and Townsend report their findings from a mathematical model that investigates the separated effects of changes to left ventricular (LV) mass and to longitudinal shortening, on ejection fraction (see article on page 446).1 They show that the increased radial wall thickness in LV hypertrophy means that ejection fraction may be preserved despite impaired long-axis shortening. This supports the growing evidence that ejection fraction alone may be an insufficient descriptor of systolic function.
As cardiology is no longer bereft of rapid, calibrated measures of systolic function with the
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg 
Reddit 
Technorati What's this?
Relevant Article
- A novel mechanism of heart failure with normal ejection fraction
- D H MacIver and M Townsend
Heart 2008 94: 446-449.[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
- Full Text
- Full Text (PDF)
- Submit a response
- Alert me when this article is cited
- Alert me when eLetters are posted
- Alert me if a correction is posted
- Citation Map
Services
- Email this link to a friend
- Similar articles in this journal
- Similar articles in PubMed
- Add article to my folders
- Download to citation manager
- Request Permissions
Citing Articles
Google Scholar
PubMed
Topic Collections
-
Drugs: cardiovascular system
-
Echocardiography
-
Clinical diagnostic tests
-
Hypertension
- Epidemiology
- Relevant Article
Bookmark with
Register for free content
The full back archive is now available for all BMJ Journals. Institutional subscribers may access the entire archive as part of their subscription. Personal subscribers will also have access to all content when logged in. Non-subscribers who register have free access to all articles published before 2006 right back to volume 1 issue 1. Register here to access the free archive of all BMJ Journals.
Don't forget to sign up for content alerts so you keep up to date with all the articles as they are published.
