Non invasive Measurements of Myocardial Hypertrophy in Patients with Essential Hypertension Treated with Eprosartan: Contribution of the Physics

Objective: The main objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of the treatment with eprosartan on cardiac hypertrophy in hypertensive patients using the echocardiogram to measure the hypertrophy of left ventricle. We studied 60 untreated patients diagnosed of mild to moderate hypertension which received after the diagnosis 600 mg/day of eprosartan, a novel direct angiotensin inhibitor recently introduced to treat hypertension. All patients were submitted to a standard echocardiographic study before the treatment and after 6 months of it We evaluated by echocardiogram the following parameters: left ventricular septum and posterior wall thickness, left ventricular mass, E/A index of mitral flow considering abnormal when this index was less than 1, and left ventricular ejection fraction. Results: at the beginning we found a systolic/diastolic pressures of 165±9/ 96±4 mmHg compared with the end of study of 124±2/79±3 mmHg (p<0.05). Septum and posterior wall thickness were respectively at baseline 13.2±2 and 12.1±1.1 mmHg and at the end 11.5±1.2 and 10.5±1.3 mmHg (p<0.05 for both of them). The E/A mitral flow index was less than 1 at baseline in 45 patients compared with 19 patients after treatment (p<0.05). Respect to left ventricular mass we found at the beginning 232±7.5 gr., compared to 194±9 gr., at the end of this study (p<0.05). We did not find any significant differences regarding left ventricular ejection fraction between both groups. Conclusions: we can remark that eprosartan is a very useful drug to reduce not only blood pressure but also left ventricular hypertrophy and improve left ventricular diastolic function in patients with essential hypertension according with parameters measured with non invasive methods