Cardiovascular prognostic value of vascular involvement in Behcet's disease

Subclinical atherosclerosis in Behcet’s disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…2B). Pooled data from inactive disease patients [20,22,23,25,26,[37][38][39] also revealed impaired FMD with moderate heterogeneity (SMD ¼ À0.74, 95% CI: À 0.97 to À 0.51, p ¼ 0.0001, I 2 ¼ 35.5%) (Fig. 2C).…”

“…1), 24 studies met the criteria for inclusion in the analysis: 9 investigated FMD and/or EMD [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26], 11 IMT [8,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] and 4 investigated both [37][38][39][40].…”

“…BD patients were then split according to active and inactive disease where possible: we arbitrarily considered patients with vascular involvement [20,37,38] as having active disease and pooled them with active disease patients proper [20,22,23,25,26,40]: FMD was significantly lower with moderate heterogeneity (SMD ¼ À1.17, 95% CI: À 1.45 to À 0.89, p ¼ 0.0001, I 2 ¼ 37.5%) (Fig. 2B).…”

“…All investigators measured IMT at the common carotid artery but for one study where the authors presented the average IMT taken at the distal common carotids, at the far wall of the carotid bulbs and at the far wall of the internal carotid artery [8]. Indeed studies varied with regards to inclusion criteria: n ¼ 3 compared patients with and without vascular involvement and provided separate measurements [27,37,38], n ¼ 1 provided separate data for patients with and without systemic involvement (mucocutaneous only) [36], n ¼ 3 studies included a mixture of active and inactive disease [32,34,40] of which one provided separate data for active and inactive disease [32], n ¼ 3 studies were carried out on patients with low or inactive disease [31,33,35], n ¼ 2 were carried out on patients without vascular and/or systemic involvement [38,39] and n ¼ 2 were carried out in patients without cardiovascular risk factors [28,30].…”

Assessment of left ventricular function and aortic elastic properties in patients with Behçet’s disease using conventional and tissue Doppler echocardiography

“…Endocardial involvement may lead to endocardial fibrosis involving the right or left ventricle [20] and may predispose to intracavitary thrombus formation, which may lead to pulmonary emboli [21]. Also, the inflammatory process may involve arteries and arterioles of the coronary system leading to silent ischemia, myocardial infarction and systolic or diastolic dysfunction [22] which may be due to filling abnormalities [23].…”