Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography
Original articleQuantitative assessment of aortic sclerosis using ultrasonic backscatter☆
Section snippets
Patients
The study population consisted of 26 consecutive patients with ASC (14 women, mean age 76 years, range 57-91 years), 6 patients with AS (3 women, mean age 79 years, range 69-89 years) who were identified while being referred for nonemergency echocardiographic evaluation, and a control group of 23 healthy volunteers (11 women, mean age 30 years, range 21-39 years), none of whom had left ventricular (LV) dysfunction, valvular heart disease, or thickening of the aortic valves detected by
Patient characteristics
Table 1 summarizes the clinical characteristics of patients with ASC. Many of the patients with ASC had multiple coronary risk factors for ischemic heart disease (85%). Approximately 50% of patients had known symptomatic ischemic heart disease. There were 10 patients with significant renal dysfunction (serum creatinine > 0.12 mmol/L) and 4 patients with mild anemia (hemoglobin < 115 g/L). There was no significant correlation between backscatter of blood pool and hemoglobin concentrations.
Aortic valve findings
Discussion
The results of the study indicate that: (1) the mean levels of ultrasonic backscatter in patients with ASC are approximately 60% greater than in healthy young adults; (2) ultrasonic backscatter scores in patients with ASC are directly correlated with subjective scoring of sclerosis and with transvalvular pressure gradients in patients with mild-moderate AS; and, most importantly, (3) ultrasonic backscatter is a reproducible technique, with mean differences between estimates on the basis of
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the technical assistance of Ms Linda Passfield in this publication.
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Supported in part by a grant from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. Ms Ngo was a recipient of a divisional postgraduate research scholarship from the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Adelaide.