Doppler echocardiography in diastology: 35 years of Japanese contribution to its advancement and utility.

Echocardiography is one of the most important and clinically useful techniques in the assessment of diastolic function. Because of the prevalence of this technique, "diastology" and even the concept of diastolic heart failure have become familiar to researchers and physicians. We believe the first description by Kitabatake and his colleagues in 1982 of the use of Doppler technique to assess the transmitral flow velocity pattern in various cardiac diseases was the beginning of this development. Since then, a number of excellent works regarding echocardiographic assessment of diastolic function have emerged from Japan. Here, we review the Japanese contributions to the development of the use of Doppler echocardiography in diastology.