Peripheral Venous Pressure-Assisted Exercise Stress Echocardiography in the Evaluation of Pulmonary Hypertension During Exercise in Patients With Suspected Heart Failure With Preserved Ejection Fraction

Background: Identification of elevated pulmonary artery (PA) pressures during exercise may provide diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic implications in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. Although widely performed, exercise stress echocardiography may underestimate true PA pressures due to the difficulty in estimating right atrial pressure (RAP) during exercise. We hypothesized that peripheral venous pressure (PVP) could allow for reliable estimation of RAP, and thus PA pressures during exercise stress echocardiography. Methods: In protocol 1, we investigated the accuracy of PVP compared with simultaneously measured RAP at rest and during exercise right heart catheterization in 19 subjects. In protocol 2, we examined whether the addition of PVP to Doppler exercise echocardiography (tricuspid regurgitant velocity) would increase the ability to identify exercise-induced pulmonary hypertension compared with inferior vena cava-based RAP estimation in 60 patients with dyspnea. Results: In protocol 1, PVP was strongly correlated with simultaneously measured RAP at rest and during exercise (r=0.77 and 0.90), with little overestimation of invasively measured RAP (bias 3.4 mm Hg at rest and 1.7 mm Hg during exercise). In protocol 2, PVP increased dramatically during exercise echocardiography (14 +/- 5 mm Hg) while an increase in inferior vena cava-based RAP was modest (6 +/- 4 mm Hg). Exercise PA pressures calculated from PVP and tricuspid regurgitant velocity were significantly higher than those estimated from inferior vena cava and the use of PVP increased the proportion of patients with exercise-induced pulmonary hypertension from 40% to 68%. Conclusions: PVP may prevent underestimation of PA pressures during exercise echocardiography and could be a preferred approach to identify exercise-induced pulmonary hypertension in patients with suspected heart failure with preserved ejection fraction.