Introduction
Echocardiography is widely used as a noninvasive cardiac imaging
technique in the clinical setting for the evaluation of heart structure
and functions. Doppler echocardiography is a method used to identify the
direction and velocity of blood flow and therefore, it is an integral
part of the cardiovascular echocardiographic examination, providing a
precise hemodyanamic evaluation of the heart (1).
Blood and tissue velocities measured by Doppler are widely used tools
for the evaluation of cardiac systolic and diastolic functions. Blood
flow causes high frequency, low amplitude signals that are obtained
using Pulse Wave (PW) Doppler. Tissue Doppler Imaging (TDI) is designed
to characterise low velocity, high amplitude signals from myocardial
motion, and are obtained by inverting the low pass filter used in
traditional Doppler to a high pass filter (2,3). Tissue Doppler imaging
examines the longitudinal component of myocardial contraction throughout
the cardiac cycle.
The diastolic parameters may show difference in distinct patient
subgroups. Age-related changes in diastolic indices have also been found
to be gender specific. In the elderly population, diastolic function
deteriorates more significantly in female gender than in male.
Furthermore, although standart Doppler values have been established in
current guidelines, these values may also be variable according to
racial and ethnical factors. Therefore, it is important to be aware of
the normal reference values of cardiac Doppler data in the clinical
setting according to age, gender, race and body surface area (4).
Recently, we, for the first time in Turkey, have reported
two-dimensional echocardiographic normal reference ranges for cardiac
chamber quantification in a large cohort of Turkish individuals (5).
Besides the chamber sizes, essential data regarding the relationship
between these measurements and age, gender, body surface area and
geographical region-dependent differences have been provided.
In this study, we aimed to determine echocardiographic reference values
for PW Doppler and TDI velocities in a healthy Turkish population to
obtain normal Doppler findings and patterns according to age and gender.