Myocardial and aortic stiffening in the early course of primary aldosteronism.

Background: Primary aldosteronism (PA) has been experimentally and clinically linked to myocardial and vascular fibrosis, and it has been further associated with left ventricular (LV) structural adaptations.

Hypothesis: Functional cardiovascular adaptations in hypertensive patients with PA precede structural alterations in the early stages of the disease.

Methods: We studied 17 hypertensive subjects with a recent diagnosis of PA (10 male patients, aged approximately 55 y, with office blood pressure [BP] of 137/88 mm Hg), and 30 essential hypertensives matched for age, sex, office BP levels, treatment status, and LV mass index (LVMI).

Relation of left ventricular concentric remodeling to levels of C-reactive protein and serum amyloid A in patients with essential hypertension.

In this study, we investigated possible relations between left ventricular (LV) concentric remodeling and plasma levels of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) and serum amyloid-A (SAA) in subjects who had essential hypertension; 65 consecutive subjects who had hypertension, did not have diabetes, and had normal LV mass were categorized as those whose LV relative wall thickness was <0.44 (n = 41) and those whose relative wall thickness was > or =0.44.