Vasodilation of epicardial coronary artery can be measured with transthoracic echocardiography

Transthoracic Doppler echocardiography (TTE) has been introduced as a noninvasive tool to measure coronary flow velocity reserve (CFVR). Velocity measurement, however, fails to take into account epicardial coronary artery vasodilation during hyperemia and this may cause underestimation of CFVR measurements. Therefore, we sought to determine whether the vasodilation of epicardial coronary artery can be measured during cold pressor test (CPT) and adenosine infusion simultaneously with the flow velocity measurement using TTE. We studied 41 healthy nonsmoking men with a linear high-frequency 8.0-MHz transducer. The CPT and adenosine infusion dilated the diameter of the distal left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD) from 1.4 +/- 0.4 mm to 1.5 +/- 0.4 mm (14 +/- 13%, p < 0.01) and from 1.4 +/- 0.4 mm to 1.8 +/- 0.5 mm (31 +/- 19%, p < 0.01), respectively. The CPT increased flow velocity and calculated coronary blood flow rate (velocity time integral x cross-sectional area) from 0.23 +/- 0.05 m/s to 0.36 +/- 0.13 m/s (31 +/- 34%, p < 0.01) and from 8.1 +/- 4.2 mL/min to 11.4 +/- 6.0 mL/min (47 +/- 51%, p < 0.01). CFVR and calculated coronary blood flow rate reserve were 3.9 +/- 1.0 and 6.0 +/- 1.9, respectively. In Bland-Altman analysis, velocity measurements underestimated the vasodilation response of the CPT and adenosine compared with the measurements where epicardial diameter dilation was taken into account. Intra- and interobserver variability of diameter measurements was low (coefficient of variation [CV] 2.6 to 6.5%). Day-to-day, within-day and intersonographer variabilities were of similar magnitude (CV 4.6 to 8.2%), suggesting good reproducibility. This study demonstrates that TTE can be used to assess changes in both epicardial coronary artery diameter and flow velocity simultaneously in the distal LAD artery.