Right ventricular function in dilated cardiomyopathy: women are the stronger sex!

Excerpt

Heart failure is mostly caused by disease of the left ventricle, but the right ventricle may play a more important role in functional capacity and prognosis of heart failure patients than is often realised. Thus, right ventricular (RV) function has been well established to be a better marker for exercise capacity than left ventricular (LV) function in both ischaemic and dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) [1], and is correlated with clinical status and outcome in patients with ischaemic LV dysfunction [2]. Interestingly, for a comparable degree of LV dysfunction, RV function is even worse in patients with idiopathic DCM as compared with patients with ischaemic cardiomyopathy [3, 4] and, also in this patient group, is a predictor for outcome [5]. …