Echocardiographic Criteria for CRT Patient Selection: Is There Still a Role?

Authors

  • Emmanouil Poulidakis Evagelismos Hospital, Athens
  • Antonis S Manolis Athens University School of Medicine & First Department of Cardiology, Evagelismos General Hospital of Athens, Athens, Greece

Keywords:

heart failure, cardiac resynchronization therapy, cardiac dyssynchrony, biventricular pacing

Abstract

Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) is a relatively new therapeutic option for patients with systolic heart failure (HF) and electrocardiographic evidence of dyssynchrony. However, with current selection guidelines, still a proportion of patients do not respond to this interventional therapy. Several echocardiographic criteria have been proposed to address this issue, but research so far has failed to provide a single and simple measurement with adequate accuracy for CRT candidate selection. While investigation for this subject is still under way, new possible roles of echocardiography in CRT implementation arise, such as assistance in selecting the site of left ventricular (LV) pacing lead and optimizing CRT device programming during follow up visits.

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Published

2015-01-17

Issue

Section

Review