Regional in vivo transit time measurements of aortic pulse wave velocity in mice with high-field CMR at 17.6 Tesla
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RESEARCH
Open Access
Regional in vivo transit time measurements of aortic pulse wave velocity in mice with high-field CMR at 17.6 Tesla Marco Parczyk1*, Volker Herold1, Gert Klug2, Wolfgang R Bauer2, Eberhard Rommel1, Peter M Jakob1
Abstract Background: Transgenic mouse models are increasingly used to study the pathophysiology of human cardiovascular diseases. The aortic pulse wave velocity (PWV) is an indirect measure for vascular stiffness and a marker for cardiovascular risk. Results: This study presents a cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) transit time (TT) method that allows the determination of the PWV in the descending murine aorta by analyzing blood flow waveforms. Systolic flow pulses were recorded with a temporal resolution of 1 ms applying phase velocity encoding. In a first step, the CMR method was validated by pressure waveform measurements on a pulsatile elastic vessel phantom. In a second step, the CMR method was applied to measure PWVs in a group of five eight-month-old apolipoprotein E deficient (ApoE(-/-)) mice and an age matched group of four C57Bl/6J mice. The ApoE(-/-) group had a higher mean PWV (PWV = 3.0 ± 0.6 m/s) than the C57Bl/6J group (PWV = 2.4 ± 0.4 m/s). The difference was statistically significant (p = 0.014). Conclusions: The findings of this study demonstrate that high field CMR is applicable to non-invasively determine and distinguish PWVs in the arterial system of healthy and diseased groups of mice.
Background Cardiovascular diseases are among the most common causes of death in industrialized countries. Risk factors include increased age, male sex, diabetes, hypertension, and lipoprotein abnormalities. The aorta provides at least 60 to 70% of systemic compliance [1]. Reduced elasticity and compliance of the aorta are etiologic in cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis and therefore serve as early indicators of asymptomatic atherosclerotic lesions [2,3]. The velocity of pressure and flow pulses travelling down an elastic vessel termed the pulse wave velocity (PWV) increases with arterial stiffness [4]. The PWV is a direct measure of arterial stiffness [3] and serves as an independent predictor for cardiovascular risk and mortality [5-8] in many cases of CVD, including atherosclerosis [9]. In this study, a high field cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) protocol * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Lehrstuhl für Experimentelle Physik 5, Am Hubland, 97074 Würzburg, Germany Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
using the transit time (TT) method [10] was developed and tested for its capability to distinguish groups of healthy and atherosclerotic mice by means of the PWVs in the descending aortas. Originally, the transit time method has been used to determine the PWV in humans using several invasive methods [11,12] and non-invasive methods such as ultrasound [13,14] and CMR [15] before it was applied to smaller mammals such as mice. To this day new CMR methods have been refi
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