Cardiac dysfunction investigation in prehypertension.

To study the possible cardiac function alternation in hypertension, 13 cardiac function parameters such as blood pressure (BP), cardiac output (CO), ejection time (ET) and stroke volume (SV), etc. were measured in 898 subjects. The subjects were grouped into 3 groups by blood pressure, namely: normotension, prehypertension and hypertension group. Statistic analyses showed that in prehypertension subjects, peak velocity and cardiac output increased, while the systemic vascular resistance index had no significant increase compared with normotensive. Peak velocity, mean pressure gradient and velocity time integral in prehypertension were significantly correlated with systolic blood pressure, however, no correlation was found in either normotension or hypertension subjects. The results suggest that increasing cardiac output and peak velocity occurred at the phase of prehypertension, which may conduce to the elevation of blood pressure.