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(Hypertension. 2003;41:e6.)
© 2003 American Heart Association, Inc.

Letters to the Editor

Reliability of Different Echocardiographic Methods in Determining Left Ventricular Mass in Healthy Men and Athletes

Institute of Sports and Preventive Medicine, University of Saarland, Saarbruecken/Homburg, Germany

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

To the Editor:

We read the interesting paper of Myerson et al entitled "Left Ventricular Mass: Reliability of M-Mode and 2-Dimensional Echocardiographic Formulas".¹ The authors determined left ventricular (LV) mass in physically fit and healthy male British Army recruits before and after a 10-week physical training program (obviously an "intensive strength and endurance training"²) by means of echocardiography and the in vivo gold-standard of cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR). Compared with CMR, the LV mass was significantly underestimated by use of the M-mode American Society of Echocardiography (ASE)-cube formula of Devereux³ (-14.3 g; -7.8%) and the 2-dimensional (2D) method of Reichek⁴ (-2.6 g; -1.4%). Furthermore, after the 10-week training program, a significant increase of the LV mass of about 8 g for each method, with standard deviations of 28 g (M-mode), 23 g (2D) and 14 g (CMR), is reported.

It is an important finding that, even in normal hearts, both echocardiographic methods revealed a high scatter of values when compared with CMR, and therefore, CMR should be the preferred modality for examining exercise-induced changes of LV mass, at least in smaller groups.¹ However, the reported underestimation of LV mass by echocardiography is in contrast to results of previous studies. Compared with CMR, by use of the ASE-cube formula of Devereux,³ an overestimation of 24 g (11%) and 117 g (with "a variation from -6% to +66% from the mean measurements") was demonstrated by Kuhl et al⁵ and Devlin et al,⁶ respectively. In addition, the cited studies of Bottini et . . . [Full Text of this Article]