Echocardiographic Assessment of Left Ventricular Function in Type 1 Gauchers Disease.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Hematology Volume 2010, Article ID 820843, 5 pages doi:10.1155/2010/820843 Clinical Study Echocardiographic Assessment of Left Ventricular Function in Type 1 Gaucher’s Disease ˇ 1 2 3 Mirta Kozelj, Samo Zver, and Vesna Zadnik 1 Department of Cardiology, University Medical Centre Ljubljana, Zaloska 7, 1525 Ljubljana, Slovenia ˇ 2 Department of Haematology, University Medical Centre Ljubljana, Zaloska 7, 1525 Ljubljana, Slovenia ˇ 3 Institute of Oncology, Zaloska 2, 1525 Ljubljana, Slovenia ˇ ˇ Correspondence should be addressed to Mirta Kozelj, mirta.kozelj@kclj.si Received 22 March 2010; Revised 20 May 2010; Accepted 14 June 2010 Academic Editor: M. Gertz ˇ Copyright © 2010 Mirta Kozelj et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. There is predominate opinion among physicians managing type 1 Gauchers’ disease (GD) that cardiac involvement is not an issue in these patients. In order to follow this hypothesis, we prospectively investigated 15 adult imiglucerase-treated type 1 GD patients by echocardiography, Doppler, and tissue Doppler echocardiography. This was a case-controlled study with 18 matched healthy volunteers. The obtained data was correlated with the levels of NT-pro