Myocardial Work as a Metric of Cardiac Performance

The current issue of JASE features three articles on myocardial work, an echocardiographic metric of cardiac function that appears increasingly important in quantifying myocardial effects of various disease states. By including simultaneous measurement of systemic blood pressure, myocardial work accounts for the loading conditions during myocardial deformation. It can be measured using commercially available software in which peak left ventricular pressure is estimated using a brachial cuff blood pressure recording acquired at the time of the study and combined with speckle-tracking strain information.