الفهرس 
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Abstract
This study was done to evaluate echocardiographic assessment of aortic pulse wave velocity (PWV) as a new parameter for left ventricular (LV) diastolic dysfunction (DD) by correlation with current echocardiographic LV DD indices, and also to correlate aortic PWV with BNP level as BNP provides strong prognostic information for unfavourable outcomes in patients with LV DD.
This study was conducted at Ain-shams and Helwan university hospitals in the period from December 2017 to December 2018, it was conducted on 100 patients of both sexes, aged from 55 to 60 years with preserved ejection fraction >50%. They were divided into two groups; case group that included 80 patients with asymptomatic LV DD, and control group that included 20 patients with normal diastolic function.
All patients were subjected to full history and thorough physical examination. BNP, 12 lead surface ECG and full echocardiography with assessment of aortic PWV were done.
We found that aortic PWV assessed by echocardiography has significant positive correlation with age and BMI.
We also found a significant correlation between aortic PWV and echocardiographic indices of DD; aortic PWV has significant positive correlation with E/e‘, left atrial volume index and tricuspid regurge velocity, but it has significant negative correlation with lateral and septal e‘.
We also found a significant positive correlation between aortic PWV and BNP level.
We found that aortic PWV with a cut-off value of 12.5 m/s has significant area under the ROC curve (0.86) with high sensitivity (92.3%) and specificity (75%) for detection of LV DD.
Summary
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Study limitations
The results were only obtained from two medical centers (Ainshams & Helwan university hospitals).
Sample size was relatively small.
Our study included only a specific age group from 55-60 years so generalization on other age groups may be limited.
Special subsets of population (patients with; coronary artery disease, peripheral arterial disease & chronic kidney disease) were not adequately represented in our study, which is partially due to small sample size.
Our study population was only from Egypt so generalization on other populations may be limited.
Many of our patients were chronically treated with antihypertensive medications that may modify indices of PWV and diastolic function, Although blood pressure of our patients were controlled especially at time of examination, we can not exclude different effects of different classes of drugs on PWV and diastolic function.
There was no available echocardiographic software to detect the time interval between aortic-pulsed Doppler wave and peak of R wave on the gated ECG, thus making these values susceptible to inter-observer variability