Differential Short-Term Repeated Forearm Hyperaemic Reactivity in Coronary Artery Disease Patients Compared to Healthy Low Risk Participants

الملخص EN

The hyperaemic response of the forearm is a widely used technique to assess the vascular reactivity.

Little is known about the short-term reproducibility and the possible exhaustion of this response in normal or diseased states.

As such, the current study was conducted to assess this phenomenon using a unique nuclear medicine- (NM-) based technique.

19 patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) undergoing NM exercise stress tests and 15 low risk (LR) participants completed 2 reactive hyperaemia tests, using a SPECT-based technique, separated by 15 min.

Analyses revealed that CAD patients had lower hyperaemic responses than LR participants (P<.001), and that there was a significant group × time interaction (P<.005), such that LR participants showed a larger decrease in the reactivity (5.2±0.4 to 3.6±0.4) than the CAD patients (2.9±0.3 to 2.6±0.3).

These results suggest that there is a variability, due to disease states, in the reproducibility of the hypaeremic reactivity.

This needs to be taken into account in short-term repeated measure studies.