Delayed heart rate recovery (HRR) post treadmill exercise testing reflects autonomic dysfunction and is related to worse cardiovascular outcome. The present study compared HRR in normotensive subjects and hypertensive patients taking anti-hypertensive medications with controlled blood pressure (BP) and uncontrolled BP. A total of 279 consecutive patients with (n=140, HP) and without (n=139, N-HP) essential hypertension who were hospitalized in our department during May 2012 to March 2016 were included in this study. All subjects underwent treadmill exercise testing. Hypertensive patients were divided into controlled BP (n=88) and uncontrolled BP (n=52) groups according to their BP prior to treadmill exercise testing. Body mass index, triglyceride level and incidence of diabetes mellitus (DM) were significantly higher in the HP group than in the N-HP group, and HDL-c and HRR were significantly lower. Male gender, higher creatinine value and lower cholesterol and HDL-c were associated with lower HRR in the N-HP group, and higher triglyceride, lower LDL-c, and HDL-c were associated with lower HRR in the HP group. More frequent, ⩾3, antihypertensive drug use, less monotherapy use and high incidence of smokers and lower HRR were found in hypertensive patients with uncontrolled BP compared to hypertensive patients with controlled BP. The present results demonstrate that uncontrolled BP following antihypertensive medication is associated with lower HRR in hypertensive patients.

Background: Both coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) and exercise electrocardiography (ExECG) are non-invasive testing methods for the evaluation of coronary artery disease (CAD). However, there was controversy on the diagnostic performance of these methods due to the limited data in each single study. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis to address these issues. Methods: We searched PubMed and Embase databases up to May 22, 2015. Two authors identified eligible studies, extracted data and accessed quality. Pooled estimation of sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio (PLR), negative likelihood ratio (NLR), diagnostic odds ratio (DOR), summary receiver-operating characteristic curve (SROC) and the area under curve (AUC) of CCTA and ExECG for the diagnosis of CAD were calculated using Stata, Meta-Disc and Review Manager statistical software. and 0.7727±0.0638, respectively. There is no heterogeneity caused by threshold effect in CCTA or ExECG analysis. The Deeks' test showed no potential publication bias (P=0.17).Conclusions: CCTA has better diagnostic performance than ExECG in the evaluation of CAD, which can provide a better solution for the clinical problem of the diagnosis for CAD. J Thorac Dis 2016;8(7):1688-1696 jtd.amegroups.com standard for assessing anatomical stenosis severity, a variety of non-invasive testing methods have been advocated recently to provide an anatomic and/or functional evaluation of coronary artery. Available methods include exercise/stress electrocardiography (ExECG), single proton emission computed tomography (SPECT), myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI), coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) and coronary computed tomography with fractional flow reserve (FFRCT). Despite these facts, assessment of the presence of CAD remains challenging.Among these diagnostic methods, ExECG is a wellestablished and inexpensive procedure to evaluate intermediate risk patients with angina pectoris (2). However, ExECG has relatively limited diagnostic performance in patients with silent CAD (3). As a new non-invasive alternative test, CCTA has high diagnostic performance to rule out CAD (4,5). Moreover, CCTA can be used in patients with equivocal stress test or unable to exercise stress test (6). But this method also suffers a number of limitations, such as a progressive loss of sensitivity and specificity as the pretest probability of disease decreases (7).To date, several studies have compared the effectiveness of CCTA with that of ExECG for the diagnosis of CAD (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14). But there was controversy about the specificity of two arms (12,13). Additionally, a major limitation of these investigations was their reliance, by necessity, on observational studies due to the limited data in each single study. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis to compare the diagnostic performance of CCTA and ExECG for CAD based on a larger data, which indicates a more specific comparison about the value of anatomic and functional evaluation in clinical decisions. Methods ...

Pulse‐cancellation imaging is a novel echocardiographic imaging modality developed for detection of myocardial fibrosis. This technique cancels echocardiographic reflections from the normal myocardium but clearly displays the abnormal tissue. We describe, for the first time, pulse‐cancellation echocardiography application in detecting Fabry disease myocardial involvement. We present the case where both pulse‐cancellation imaging and cardiac MRI concurrently revealed myocardial deposits in a patient with genotypically confirmed Fabry disease.

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