Early Detection of Cardiac Involvement in Systemic Sclerosis Assessed by Tissue-Doppler Echocardiography: Relationship with Neurohormonal Activation and Endothelial Dysfunction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Cardiopulmonary complications are common in patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc). We assessed cardiac involvement in patients with SSc using echocardiography and investigated the association of N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) and asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA) with echocardiographic measures of myocardial function in sera of patients with SSc who had no symptoms of heart failure. METHODS: We prospectively studied 52 patients with SSc (mean age 55.7 +/- 10.1 yrs, 51 women), with conventional and tissue-Doppler echocardiography. Plasma NT-proBNP and ADMA levels were measured in all patients. Data were compared with those obtained from 25 healthy controls comparable for age and sex. RESULTS: Patients with SSc had impaired left ventricular (LV) and right ventricular diastolic function expressed by inverted ratio of peak early to peak late transmitral (Mit E/A) and transtricuspid velocity and increased left atrial diameter compared with controls. Peak systolic mitral lateral annular motion velocity and peak early diastolic mitral lateral annular motion velocity (LV Em) were lower, while LV E/Em ratio was higher, in patients with SSc compared to controls. ADMA was significantly related with LV Em and E/Em ratio. NT-proBNP was associated with Mit E, Mit E/A ratio and mitral deceleration time. Significant correlation was also observed between NT-proBNP and ADMA levels. CONCLUSION: Depressed cardiac function is common, even in asymptomatic patients with SSc. NT-proBNP and ADMA are significantly correlated with echocardiographic abnormalities, providing a potent link for cardiac function, neuroendocrine derangement, and endothelial dysfunction in patients with SSc who have cardiac disease.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".