Echocardiographic Partition Values and Prevalence of Left Ventricular Hypertrophy in Hypertensive Jamaicans

Left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) detected by either electrocardiography or echo- cardiography has been shown to be an extremely strong predictor of morbidity and mortality in patients with essential hypertension and in members of the general population. Alternative to LVH, left ventricular geometrical patterns offer incremental prognostic value beyond that provided by the other cardiovascular risk factors including left ventricular mass (LVM). Combination of LVM and relative wall thickness (RWT) can be used to identify different left ventricular geometrical patterns. Various indexation methods normalised for LVM have been shown to offer prognostic significance. There was no prior study on the prevalence of LVH and geometric patterns in hypertensive patients in Jamaica using multiple partition values. Our study was designed to estimate the prevalence of LVH and geometrical patterns in a hypertensive Caribbean population in Jamaica using 10 different published cut-off values.