Performances of Doppler echocardiography for diagnosis of acute, mild, or moderate cardiac allograft rejection

Abstract THE RECOGNITION of acute allograft rejection (AR) remains one of the most important problems in the follow-up of patients after cardiac orthotopic transplantation (COT). Cyclosporine (CyA) has improved the survival of patients with COT, but this treatment induces a more insidious development of AR with a possible delayed diagnosis. The gold standard for diagnosis of AR is endomyocardial biopsy (EB), an invasive technique that provides only located information. 1 Doppler echocardiography seems to be one of the more promising techniques for the detection of mild or moderate AR. 2–6 The objective of this study was to evaluate prospectively the value of several echocardiographic and Doppler parameters for the diagnosis of acute allograft rejection.