Diastolic dysfunction in diabetes and the metabolic syndrome: promising potential for diagnosis and prognosis

Cardiac disease in diabetes mellitus and in the metabolic syndrome consists of both vascular and myocardial abnormalities. The latter are characterised predominantly by diastolic dysfunction, which has been difficult to evaluate in spite of its prevalence. While traditional Doppler echocardiographic parameters enable only semiquantitative assessment of diastolic function and cannot reliably distinguish perturbations in loading conditions from altered diastolic functions, new technologies enable detailed quantification of global and regional diastolic function. The most readily available technique for the quantification of subclinical diastolic dysfunction is tissue Doppler imaging, which has been integrated into routine contemporary clinical practice, whereas cine magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) remains a promising complementary research tool for investigating the molecular mechanisms of the disease. Diastolic function is reported to vary linearly with age in normal persons, decreasing by 0.16 cm/s each year. Diastolic function in diabetes and the metabolic syndrome is determined by cardiovascular risk factors that alter myocardial stiffness and myocardial energy availability/bioenergetics. The latter is corroborated by the improvement in diastolic function with improvement in metabolic control of diabetes by specific medical therapy or lifestyle modification. Accordingly, diastolic dysfunction reflects the structural and metabolic milieu in the myocardium, and may allow targeted therapeutic interventions to modulate cardiac metabolism to prevent heart failure in insulin resistance and diabetes

Impact of Diabetes on Postinfarction Heart Failure and Left Ventricular Remodeling

Diabetes mellitus, the metabolic syndrome, and the underlying insulin resistance are increasingly associated with diastolic dysfunction and reduced stress tolerance. The poor prognosis associated with heart failure in patients with diabetes after myocardial infarction is likely attributable to many factors, important among which is the metabolic impact from insulin resistance and hyperglycemia on the regulation of microvascular perfusion and energy generation in the cardiac myocyte. This review summarizes epidemiologic, pathophysiologic, diagnostic, and therapeutic data related to diabetes and heart failure in acute myocardial infarction and discusses novel perceptions and strategies that hold promise for the future and deserve further investigation

Left atrioventricular remodeling in the assessment of the left ventricle diastolic function in patients with heart failure: a review of the currently studied echocardiographic variables

Multiparametric echocardiographic imaging of the failing heart is now increasingly used and useful in decision making in heart failure. The reasons for this, relies on the need of different strategies of handling these patients, as differentiation of systolic or diastolic dysfunction, as well as on the gamma of approaches available, such as percutaneous and surgical revascularization, devices implantations, and valvular regurgitations and stenosis corrections. Congestive heart failure in patients with normal left ventricular diameters or preserved left ventricular ejection fraction had been pointed out recently as present in a proportion so high as 40 to 50 percent of cases of heart failure, mainly due to the epidemics in well developed countries, as is the problem of not well controlled metabolic states (such as obesity and diabetes), but also due to the real word in developing countries, as is the case of hypertension epidemics and its lack of adequate control. As a matter of public utility, the guidelines in the diagnosis and treatment of such patients will have to be cheap, available, easily reproducible, and ideally will furnish answers for the clinician questions not in a binary "black or white" manner, but with graduations, so if possible it has to be quantitative. The present paper aim to focus on the current clinical applications of tissue Doppler and of left atrial function and remodeling, and its pathophysiologic relationship with the left ventricle, as will be cleared in the documented review of echocardiography that follows, considering that the need of universal data on the syndrome of the failing heart does not mean, unfortunately, that all patients and clinicians in developing countries have at their own health facilities the same imaging tools, since they are, as a general rule, expensive