A simple formula to predict echocardiographic diastolic dysfunction-electrocardiographic diastolic index.

Background: Diastolic dysfunction (DD) in transthoracic echocardiography (TTE), which is a poorly understood entity due to its limited treatment, is frequently encountered in daily clinical practice of cardiology. An electrocardiographic (ECG) index to predict echocardiographic DD has not been elucidated yet. We aim to exhibit an electrocardiographic diastolic index (EDI) to predict TTE DD with high sensitivity and specificity.

Materials And Methods: In this retrospective investigation, we tested the DD predictive value of EDI [aVL R amplitude × (V1S amplitude + V5R amplitude)/D1 P amplitude] on 204 consecutive adult patients without known coronary artery disease. Patients were divided into tertiles according to their EDI starting from the lowest one. The power of the EDI was also compared with the subunits of its formula by a receiver operating curve (ROC) analysis.

Results: After adjustment for confounding baseline variables, EDI in tertile 3 was associated with 24.2-fold hazard ratio of DD (odds ratio 25.2, 95% confidence interval [CI] 11.2-51.1, p < 0.001). The Spearman correlation analysis revealed moderate correlation between E/e' and EDI. A ROC analysis showed that the optimal cut-off value of the EDI to predict DD was 8.53 mV with 70% sensitivity and 70% specificity (area under the curve 0.78; 95% CI 0.71-0.84; p < 0.001).

Conclusion: The electrocardiographic diastolic index (EDI), which is an inexpensive, feasible, and easy to use formula, appears to have a considerable role to predict diastolic dysfunction (DD) in adult patients.