BACKGROUND

Although 2-dimensional strain analyses based on speckle tracking echocardiography have been used to detect myocardial deformation, the prognostic impact of 2-dimensional strain is unclear in patients with acute decompensated heart failure (HF). We investigated whether left ventricular and right ventricular (RV) strain parameters assessed by speckle tracking echocardiography provide incremental prognostic information in hospitalized patients because of acute decompensated HF.

METHODS AND RESULTS

Six hundred eighteen patients (age, 72±13 years; 38% women; ejection fraction, 46±16%) hospitalized for acute decompensated HF underwent clinical and echocardiographic evaluation just before discharge. We performed strain analyses of left ventricular global longitudinal strain and left ventricular global circumferential strain. We also analyzed RV longitudinal strain only from the free wall (RV-fwLS) and from all segments of the RV global longitudinal strain wall by using Tomtec software. The primary composite end point was cardiovascular death and readmission for HF. There were 34.8% cardiac events during a median follow-up of 427 days. In multivariate Cox models, among echocardiographic parameters, only impaired RV-fwLS (≥-13.1%; hazard ratio, 1.51; 95% CI, 1.12-2.04; P=0.01) was independently associated with cardiac events. Adding RV-fwLS to clinical risk evaluation (age, New York Heart Association class III/IV, blood urea nitrogen, and brain natriuretic peptide) markedly improved prognostic utility and consequently increased net reclassification improvement by 0.30 ( P=0.01).

CONCLUSIONS

RV-fwLS is an independent predictor of cardiac events in acute decompensated HF and provides greater prognostic power than standard echocardiographic parameters.