Study limitations
There are several limitations to our study. Firstly, this was a single center study which increases the potential for selection bias. There were also several patients excluded due to inadequate echocardiographic image quality which could have introduced an additional bias. However, no significant differences in patients baseline demographics were found between those included and excluded from this study. The utilization of only septal e’ and septal mitral annular E/e’ ratio is also a limitation to the assessment of LV diastolic function, as this is susceptible to changes in LV loading conditions. Nonetheless, these were the same echocardiographic parameters used in previous studies. Ideally, a more recent criteria to measure diastolic function should be applied but we were limited to the data available.