Enhanced external counterpulsation reduces lung/heart ratio at stress in patients with coronary artery disease.
Enhanced external counterpulsation (EECP) is a recently approved treatment modality for patients with angina and heart failure. However, the efficacy of EECP on left ventricular (LV) function has not been well established. The study was aimed to determine whether EECP leads to an improvement in objective parameters of LV function. Patients with coronary artery disease (n = 10) who showed evidence of stress-induced myocardial ischemia despite conventional medical or surgical therapies were enrolled and received EECP therapy for a total of 35 h. The therapeutic effects of EECP were examined by thallium-201 single-photon emission computed tomography (201Tl-SPECT). Compared with baseline, the lung/heart ratio at stress decreased significantly from 0.40 +/- 0.08 to 0.35 +/- 0.08 (p = 0.001) at 1 month and 0.33 +/- 0.10 (p = 0.03) at 6 months following EECP treatment. LV ejection fraction marginally improved from 56.7 +/- 7.7% to 57.6 +/- 5.9% (p = 0.382) at 1 month and to 60.1 +/- 8.6% (p = 0.062) at 6 months after EECP therapy, although not statistically significant. We concluded that EECP improved LV function, shown as the reduction of lung/heart ratio at stress, in patients with coronary artery disease, up to 6 months after EECP treatment.
Lee
Chii-Ming
CM
National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan. cmlee@ha.mc.ntu.edu.tw
Wu
Yen-Wen
YW
Jui
Hsiang-Yiang
HY
Chen
Ming-Fong
MF
Lee
Yuan-Teh
YT
Soran
Ozlem
O