PART 2: RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
PART 2: RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
Cardiac disease and poor performance of cardiac origin have a constant incidence in the equine population. The development of echocardiography in the eighties revolutionized diagnostic possibilities in equine cardiology, because it enabled the non-invasive assessment of cardiac dimensions and intra-cardiac blood flow. Unfortunately, routine echocardiography does not allow the examination of the equine heart under exercising conditions. However, in the horse, most of the cardiac diseases have an impact on performance far before symptoms become evident at rest.
Therefore, the development of new techniques that allows the investigation of the equine heart under exercising conditions is desirable for the modern equine cardiology. New techniques could enable earlier detection and refine the prognosis of cardiac diseases.
Exercise as well as pharmacological stress echocardiography is a routine technique for numerous diagnostic indications in human medicine and might also have a great potential in equine medicine.
However, post-exercise stress echocardiography is not easy to be performed in the horse and a reliable and well-tolerated pharmacological stress protocol is lacking until now.
The aims of the present work were
(1) to develop a standardized pharmacological stress protocol that induces cardiac stimulation similar to exercise, that can be performed easily in practice and that is well tolerated by the horses;
(2) to describe the effect of this pharmacological stress protocol on the major determinants of myocardial performance, e.g. preload, afterload, contractility and HR;
(3) to determine the echocardiographic parameters that reflect the effect of this pharmacological stress protocol the best;
(4) to establish references values of those echocardiographic parameters for healthy adult horses; and (5) to test stress echocardiography in the context of cardiac power output measurement in healthy adult horses.
