IMR Press / RCM / Volume 18 / Issue 4 / DOI: 10.3909/ricm0892

Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine (RCM) is published by IMR Press from Volume 19 Issue 1 (2018). Previous articles were published by another publisher in Open Access under a CC-BY (or CC-BY-NC-ND) licence, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with MedReviews, LLC.

Open Access Review
Utility of Dobutamine Stress Echocardiography in Cardiac Risk Stratification of Patients Undergoing Orthotopic Liver Transplantation
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1 Department of Internal Medicine, Albert Einstein Medical Center, Philadelphia, PA
2 Department of Digestive Diseases and Transplantation, Albert Einstein Medical Center, Philadelphia, PA
3 Division of Cardiology, Department of Internal Medicine, Albert Einstein Medical Center, Philadelphia, PA
Rev. Cardiovasc. Med. 2017, 18(4), 146–154; https://doi.org/10.3909/ricm0892
Abstract
Cardiovascular diseases are a major cause of morbidity and mortality in patients after orthotopic liver transplantation (OLT). This review includes major original articles published in the English-language literature of patients who underwent dobutamine stress echocardiography (DSE) before OLT for cardiac risk stratification. Of a total of 10 original articles (total 1699 patients undergoing DSE), 6 studies used DSE to predict major adverse cardiac events (MACE) in patients undergoing OLT and 4 reported the role of DSE in coronary artery disease (CAD) prediction in patients with end-stage liver disease. The composite incidence of MACE was 11.4%. In predicting postoperative MACE, DSE had a composite sensitivity of 0.12 (95% CI, 0.07-0.19), a specificity of 0.96 (95% CI, 0.94-0.97), a positive predictive value (PPV) of 0.26 (95% CI, 0.16-0.38), and a negative predictive value (NPV) of 0.89 (95% CI, 0.88-0.91). The presence of known CAD in a patient was shown to increase the risk of cardiac events after OLT significantly in three of six studies. The average prevalence of CAD was 14.4%. In predicting CAD, DSE had a composite sensitivity of 0.47 (95% CI, 0.32-0.62), specificity of 0.74 (95% CI, 0.68- 0.79), PPV of 0.23 (95% CI, 0.15-0.33), and NPV of 0.89 (95% CI, 0.84-0.93). This review emphasizes the need for standardizing cardiac risk stratification protocol to screen and prevent cardiac morbidity after OLT, standardizing MACE definition to allow more uniform reporting, and the need for safer and efficacious alternatives to DSE in the evaluation of OLT candidates.
Keywords
Dobutamine stress echocardiography
Cardiovascular event
Liver transplantation
Coronary artery disease
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