Results
Forty-six MS patients (23 severe and 23 very severe) and 23 healthy controls were recruited into our study. The mean age of the participants was 42.49 ± 13.1 years old (ranging from 19 to 74 years) and 68.1% (n=47) of the subjects were female. The demographic information of the participants are summarized in table 1. Mean FAC was significantly higher in healthy subjects compared with MS patients (p<0.001). However, no meaningful differences were observed between severe and very severe MS patients (p=0.97). Table 2 shows the comparison of RV functional parameters between the study groups. There were significant differences in S’ values within groups (p=0.008) using one-way ANOVA test. Further analysis by Post-Hoc Tukey test showed that S’ was significantly lower in patients with very severe MS compared with severe MS cases (p=0.017) and healthy individuals (p=0.012, table 2). There was a gradual decline in TAPSE value from the healthy subjects to very severe MS patients (p<0.001, table 2). Furthermore, RVFWS was significantly higher in healthy subjects in comparison with severe and very severe MS patients (27.4 ± 2.7 vs. 13.6 ± 7.2 and 13.4 ± 5.2, respectively; p<0.001). Average PAP values were considerably higher in all MS patients, but displayed no discrepancies among severe and very severe subjects.
Pearson and Spearman’s correlation tests were used to investigate possible associations of MVA or PAP values with other echocardiographic parameters. MVA values showed significant correlation with TAPSE and S’ values in patients with MS (r=0.55 and r=0.43, p <0.001 and p=0.004, respectively; shown in table 3). Moreover, the correlation analysis between PAP and other factors showed a substantial connection with FAC and RVFWS values (p<0.05).