Progression of left ventricular functional abnormalities in hypertensive patients with heart failure: an ultrasonic two-dimensional speckle tracking study.

Objective: Two-dimensional (2-D) strain imaging is a novel echocardiographic technique for myocardial function evaluation. We sought to investigate left ventricular (LV) systolic function in patients with heart failure caused by hypertension using a 2-D strain approach and to validate this method against Doppler strain measurements.

Methods: The study population comprised 81 patients (66.