Right Ventricular Diastolic Filling Assessed by Conventional Doppler and Tissue Doppler Imaging in Normal Children
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KENJI YASUOKA, KENJI HARADA, TOMOMI ORINO and GORO TAKADA
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Department of Pediatrics, Akita University School of Medicine, Akita 010-8543
To examine age-related changes in right ventricular filling dynamics, we performed conventional pulsed Doppler (n=99) and tissue Doppler (n=30) echocardiographic studies in normal subjects aged 7 days to 273 months. The tricuspid flow velocity during early diastole (peak E) wave correlated significantly but weakly with the logarithm of age. The peak E wave in the early neonatal period was almost 80% of the older children's values and increased to 100% by 36 months of age. In the right ventricular tissue Doppler imaging, the peak myocardial velocity during early diastole also increased significantly with the logarithm of age. However, the tissue Doppler peak A did not change with age. There was a significant correlation between the tissue Doppler peak E wave and the tricuspid peak E wave and between the tissue Doppler peak E/A wave and the tricuspid peak E/A wave. The age-related changes in the tricuspid inflow velocity patterns were similar to the age-related alterations in the right ventricular myocardial velocity patterns. Age-related changes in the tricuspid inflow velocity and myocardial velocity patterns may be related to age-related maturation in the right ventricular diastolic performance.
Key words---
tissue Doppler imaging; right ventricle; diastolic function
© 1999 Tohoku University Medical Press
Tohoku J. Exp. Med., 1999, 189, 283-294
Address for reprints: Kenji Harada, M.D., Department of Pediatrics, Akita University School of Medicine, 1-1-1 Hondo, Akita 010-8543, Japan.
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