Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares Carlos III, Madrid, Spain.
Heart Failure and Inherited Cardiac Diseases Unit, Department of Cardiology, Hospital Universitario Puerta de Hierro, Madrid, Spain.
Cardiovasc Res. 2017 Aug 1;113(10):1113-1123. doi: 10.1093/cvr/cvx090.
Heart failure (HF) has become an epidemic and constitutes a major medical, social, and economic problem worldwide. Despite advances in medical treatment, HF prognosis remains poor. The development of efficient therapies is hampered by the lack of appropriate animal models in which HF can be reliably determined, particularly in mice. The development of HF in mice is often assumed based on the presence of cardiac dysfunction, but HF itself is seldom proved. Lung ultrasound (LUS) has become a helpful tool for lung congestion assessment in patients at all stages of HF. We aimed to apply this non-invasive imaging tool to evaluate HF in mouse models of both systolic and diastolic dysfunction.
We used LUS to study HF in a mouse model of systolic dysfunction, dilated cardiomyopathy, and in a mouse model of diastolic dysfunction, diabetic cardiomyopathy. LUS proved to be a reliable and reproducible tool to detect pulmonary congestion in mice. The combination of LUS and echocardiography allowed discriminating those mice that develop HF from those that do not, even in the presence of evident cardiac dysfunction. The study showed that LUS can be used to identify the onset of HF decompensation and to evaluate the efficacy of therapies for this syndrome.
This novel approach in mouse models of cardiac disease enables for the first time to adequately diagnose HF non-invasively in mice with preserved or reduced ejection fraction, and will pave the way to a better understanding of HF and to the development of new therapeutic approaches.
心力衰竭（HF）已成为一种流行病，是全球范围内主要的医学、社会和经济问题。尽管医疗技术取得了进步，但 HF 的预后仍然很差。由于缺乏可可靠确定 HF 的合适动物模型（尤其是在小鼠中），高效疗法的开发受到了阻碍。HF 在小鼠中的发展通常基于心脏功能障碍的存在，但很少有证据表明 HF 本身的存在。肺部超声（LUS）已成为评估所有 HF 阶段患者肺部充血的有用工具。我们旨在应用这种非侵入性成像工具来评估收缩和舒张功能障碍的小鼠模型中的 HF。
我们使用 LUS 研究了收缩功能障碍性心肌病和舒张功能障碍性糖尿病心肌病的小鼠模型中的 HF。LUS 被证明是一种可靠且可重复的工具，可用于检测小鼠肺部充血。LUS 和超声心动图的结合可区分那些发生 HF 的小鼠和那些不发生 HF 的小鼠，即使存在明显的心脏功能障碍也是如此。该研究表明，LUS 可用于识别 HF 失代偿的发生，并评估该综合征的治疗效果。
这种在心脏疾病小鼠模型中的新方法首次能够在射血分数保留或降低的小鼠中进行非侵入性 HF 诊断，并为更好地理解 HF 和开发新的治疗方法铺平道路。
