Acute Hemodynamic Effects of Sublingual Nitroglycerin in Idiopathic Dilated Cardiomyopathy

Previous works dealing with vasodilator therapy in acute and chronic congestive heart failure have shown that a decrease of afterload improves left ventricular function [5, 9, 24]. This beneficial effect occurs in heart failure related to various diseases including coronary heart disease [6,10], hypertensive heart disease [20], mitral [8,14] and aortic regurgitation [26], and cardiomyopathy [7]. On the other hand, a reduction of preload with a significant decline in left ventricular filling pressure may result in decreased cardiac output [5, 15] which can be considered, in some circumstances, as a deleterious effect [33].