[Septic cardiomyopathy-diagnosis and estimation of disease severity]

The relevance of septic cardiomyopathy is frequently underestimated due to the complexity of the pattern of cardiac injury and the corresponding difficulties in quantifying the degree of functional impairment.

Account of the methods for diagnosis and severity classification of septic cardiomyopathy.

Literature review and analysis of the main findings.

Septic cardiomyopathy is characterized by both systolic and diastolic impairment of not only the left, but also the right ventricle, as well as by sinus-tachycardiomyopathy (≥ 90-95 beats/min) of variable degree. Sepsis-related organ failure assessment (SOFA) score, left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), ECG and cardiac biomarkers do not help in grading severity of septic cardiomyopathy. For that purpose either a sophisticated echocardiography diagnosis is mandatory, or the measurement of those global heart function parameters which take into account the dependency of cardiac output on afterload, in view of the pronounced vasodilatation in sepsis and septic shock, is needed. A suitable parameter on the basis of cardiac output measurement is afterload-related cardiac performance (ACP), which gives the percentage of cardiac output in a septic patient related to the cardiac output a healthy heart pumps when challenged by a fall in systemic vascular resistance to the same extent. The calculation of ACP shows that at least one in two septic patients suffers from impaired heart function and that mortality increases as severity increases.

Simple parameters like LVEF are not apt for diagnosis nor for disease severity classification of septic cardiomyopathy. For that purpose either sophisticated echocardiography techniques or load-independent parameters-best validated-ACP measurements are appropriate.