Does obesity affect the non-invasive measurement of cardiac output performed by electrical cardiometry in children and adolescents?

Authors

Luis Altamirano-Diaz, Western University
Eva Welisch, Western University
Ralf Rauch
Michael Miller, Western University
Teresa Sohee Park, London Health Science Centre
Kambiz Norozi, Western UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-17-2018

Journal

Journal of Clinical Monitoring and Computing

Volume

32

Issue

1

First Page

45

Last Page

52

URL with Digital Object Identifier

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10877-017-9994-1

Abstract

Electrical cardiometry (EC) is a non-invasive and inexpensive method for hemodynamic assessment and monitoring. However, its feasibility for widespread clinical use, especially for the obese population, has yet to be determined. In this study, we evaluated the agreement and reliability of EC compared to transthoracic Doppler echocardiography (TTE) in normal, overweight, and obese children and adolescents. We measured stroke volume (SV) and cardiac output (CO) of 131 participants using EC and TTE simultaneously. We further divided these participants according to BMI percentiles for subanalyses:95% obese (n = 83). Due to small sample size of the overweight group, we combined overweight and obese groups (OW+OB) with no significant change in results (SV and CO) before and after combining groups. There were strong correlations between EC and TTE measurements of SV (r = 0.869 and r = 0.846; p < 0.0001) and CO (r = 0.831 and r = 0.815; p < 0.0001) in normal and OW+OB groups, respectively. Bias and percentage error for CO measurements were 0.240 and 29.7%, and 0.042 and 29.5% in the normal and OW+OB groups, respectively. Indexed values for SV were lower in the OW+OB group than in the normal weight group when measured by EC (p < 0.0001) but no differences were seen when measured by TTE (p = 0.096). In all weight groups, there were strong correlations and good agreement between EC and TTE. However, EC may underestimate hemodynamic measurements in obese participants due to fat tissue.

Notes

Article available at Journal of Clinical Monitoring and Computing, Vol. 32(1).

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10877-017-9994-1