Correlation between arterial pressure at rest and during effort and left ventricular mass in hypertensive patients who were never treated

A poor correlation has been found between blood pressure at rest and left ventricular mass in the course of several echocardiographic studies on hypertensive patients. The aim of this work was to determine if this finding could be the result of previous antihypertensive therapy, which had been suspended a few weeks previously in most of the studies. In addition, we tested whether blood pressure values during physical exercise correlate with the echocardiographic indices of left ventricular mass better than the values at rest. In our group of 43 patients with mild to moderate essential hypertension who had never been pharmacologically treated, the correlation between both systolic and diastolic blood pressure and left ventricular mass was poor (r = 0.41 and 0.30 respectively). This result suggests that one or more factors other than hypertension may determine the development of left ventricular hypertrophy. However, in 10 patients with left ventricular hypertrophy a more significant correlation was found between cardiac mass and diastolic pressure (r = 0.52), rather than systolic pressure (r = 0.33). This finding supports data indicating that cardiovascular risk is related more to diastolic pressure increments than to systolic pressure. As for blood pressure values during physical exercise, in our study they did not show a better predictivity of ventricular mass than the values at rest