Early Left Ventricular Diastolic Dysfunction and Abnormal Left Ventricular-left Atrial Coupling in Asymptomatic Patients With Hypertension: A Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Feature Tracking Study

PURPOSE Hypertension (HTN) patients suffer from increased risk of left ventricular (LV) diastolic dysfunction and LV hypertrophy (LVH). Evaluation of early LV diastolic function requires accurate noninvasive diagnostic tools. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether cardiovascular magnetic resonance feature-tracking (CMR-FT) could detect early LV dysfunction and evaluate LV-left atrium (LA) correlation in HTN patients. MATERIALS AND METHODS In all, 89 HTN patients and 38 age-matched and sex-matched controls were retrospectively enrolled and underwent CMR examination. HTN patients were divided into LVH (n=38) and non-LVH (n=51) groups. All LV deformation parameters were analyzed in radial, circumferential, and longitudinal directions, including peak strain, peak systolic strain rate and peak diastolic strain rate (PDSR), LA strain and strain rate (SR), including LA reservoir function (es, SRs), conduit function (ee, SRe), and booster pump function (ea, SRa). RESULTS Compared with controls, the LV PDSR in radial, circumferential, and longitudinal directions and the LA reservoir and conduit function were significantly impaired in HTN patients regardless of LVH (all P<0.05). LV longitudinal and radial PDSR were correlated with LA reservoir and conduit function (all P<0.01). Among all LV and LA impaired deformation parameters, the longitudinal PDSR (in LV) and ee (in LA) were the most sensitive parameter for the discrimination between non-LVH and healthy volunteers, with an area under the curve of 0.70 (specificity 79%, sensitivity 55%) and 0.76 (specificity 95%, sensitivity 49%), respectively. The area under the curve reached 0.81 (specificity 82%, sensitivity 75%) combined with the longitudinal PDSR and ee. CONCLUSION CMR-FT could detect early LV diastolic dysfunction in HTN patients, which might be associated with LA reservoir and conduit dysfunction.