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Left ventricular remodeling in children and young adults with aortic coarctation two decades after surgical repair

Background

Aortic Coarctation requires a long term follow-up in order to detect late sequelae such as re-stenosis, aneurysms or arterial hypertension.

The aim of this CMR study was to measure the myocardial extracellular volume fraction (ECV) as a surrogate marker of diffuse myocardial fibrosis in patients with aortic coarctation after surgical repair in infancy.

Methods

As a part of comprehensive CMR examination myocardial extracellular volume fraction (ECV) was calculated from pre-and post- gadolinium contrast T1 measurements of blood and myocardium (Look-Locker technique) in 25 asymptomatic patients (age:18.9±7.6) with aortic coarctation after surgical repair and 10 age-matched controls. Parameters of ventricular volumes were obtained from cine CMR. All patients had normal parameters of systolic and diastolic function by echocardiography.

Results

Patients with aortic coarctation after surgical repair had an increased ECV compared to the control subjects 0.30±0.05; range 0.24-0.47 vs. 0.26±0.15 (range 0.28-0.23), p < 0.05. LV ejection fraction was 64±5.4% vs 60±4.2% (p=ns); indexed left ventricle end-diastolic volume was 80.7±21.4 ml/m2 vs 78.7±11.8 ml/m2 (p=ns); indexed left ventricle end-systolic volume was 32.1±2.1 ml/m2 vs 31.2±5.5 ml/m2 (p=ns); LV mass/BSA was 55.6±16.1 g/m2 vs 51.8±11.6 g/m2 (p=ns). LV mass/volume was 0.69±0.2 g/ml vs 0.67±0.2 g/ml (p=ns). Mild re-coarctation (ΔP≤10 mmHg) was present in four patients. One of them developed arterial hypertension which was controlled medically. None of the 25 patients had to undergo a reoperation in the past.

Conclusions

Two decades after surgical repair of aortic coarctation at infancy asymptomatic patients show an increased myocardial extracellular volume fraction (ECV) indicative of adverse tissue remodeling. Our results suggest that these patients may have a higher lifetime risk for diastolic dysfunction and arrhythmias despite optimal surgical results.

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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Kristo, I., Wegner, P., Voges, I. et al. Left ventricular remodeling in children and young adults with aortic coarctation two decades after surgical repair. J Cardiovasc Magn Reson 17 (Suppl 1), Q96 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/1532-429X-17-S1-Q96

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1532-429X-17-S1-Q96

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