[Carotid vascular structural changes and left ventricular hypertrophy].

In the literature there are few studies evaluating carotid vascular atherosclerotic involvement in patients with essential arterial hypertension. Nowadays with new non-invasive methodological methods, such as Doppler-echotomography, it is possible to evaluate accurately structural vascular and cardiac changes. In this study we evaluated the relationship between carotid vascular structural changes and cardiac left ventricular mass index in 15 normotensive subjects and in 15 patients with essential hypertension. We performed a B-mode echotomography (7.5 MHz) of a common carotid in order to measure the diameter of the vessel and intima-media wall thickness. In the same subjects we determined echocardiographic left ventricular mass index and we measured arterial pressure by sphygmomanometric method. There was no statistical significant difference in the two groups except that in systolic, diastolic and mean arterial pressure (96 +/- 2 vs 123 +/- 2 mmHg, p < 0.01), left ventricular mass index (102 +/- 3 vs 118 +/- 3 g/m2, p < 0.01) and in the common carotid intima media wall thickness (0.91 +/- 0.01 vs 2.23 +/- 0.02 mm). In the normotensive subject mean arterial pressure correlated significantly with age (r = 0.699) and with common carotid arterial diameter (r = 0.523) (both p < 0.05). In hypertensive patients, on the contrary, mean arterial pressure correlated with left ventricular mass index (r = 0.523), carotid arterial diameter (r = 0.627) and common carotid intima media wall thickness (r = 0.847). These results demonstrate that in hypertensive patients cardiac abnormalities accompanied vascular structural changes.