Quantitative Echocardiography Analysis of Pharmacological Stress Testing in Essential Hypertension

Essential hypertension is the most common cause of left ventricular hypertrophy. Changes in blood pressure, ventricular diameters and wall thickness lead to alterations of left ventricular afterload and performance [10, 19, 23]. In contrast to earlier studies [2, 5, 7], recent reports on the performance of the hypertrophied left ventricular myocardium indicate normal myocardial function in compensated essential hypertension at rest [14, 18, 24]. However, resting state conditions in normals and patients with essential hypertension are not comparable in terms of blood pressure. Therefore, characterization of left ventricular function should take into account the actual level of blood pressure as well as estimation of actual wall stress or afterload of the individual heart.