Exercise stress echocardiography for diagnosis of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction: a multicentre study

Exercise stress echocardiography is recommended as an alternative to invasive testing for diagnosing heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), but an evidence-based operational framework guiding its application is lacking.

Patients with chronic unexplained dyspnoea underwent invasive haemodynamic exercise testing with simultaneous echocardiography to test the hypotheses that (i) the current diagnostic algorithms (H2FPEF, HFA-PEFF, and HFpEF-ABA scores) could be enhanced when combined with exercise echocardiography; and (ii) incorporating resting left atrial (LA) compliance (LA reservoir strain divided by E/e') could further improve diagnostic triage, using separate cut points optimizing sensitivity and specificity. Findings were then validated in an international multicentre cohort.

Of 482 patients, HFpEF was present in 386 and non-cardiac dyspnoea in 96. Sensitivity to detect HFpEF was only 55%-60% and accuracy 61%-67% using individual diagnostic scores with currently recommended exercise echocardiography. Addition of abnormal resting LA compliance to exercise echocardiography increased sensitivity to 84%-85% but increased the false-positive rate to 31%-43%. Applying separate cut points that optimize specificity and sensitivity (either exercise E/e' ≥ 13.8 or resting LA compliance ≤1.6% to rule-in HFpEF; both exercise E/e' < 7.2 and resting LA compliance >4.4% to rule-out HFpEF, remaining patients indeterminate who require invasive testing) improved sensitivity to 95%-99% among definitively classified patients and reduced the number of patients that require invasive exercise testing from ∼60% to ∼30%. Findings were replicated in a multicentre, international validation cohort of patients undergoing rest-exercise echocardiography and invasive exercise testing.

Currently used non-invasive approaches to HFpEF diagnosis have inadequate sensitivity, indicating that exercise echocardiography cannot supplant invasive testing. Addition of LA strain imaging with optimized rule-in or rule-out values improves diagnostic triage by expanding non-invasive rule-in/rule-out classifications while identifying patients who still require invasive testing in the evaluation of HFpEF.