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Question:
What would cause an ejection fraction (EF) of 78%?
submitted by Esteban from Houston, Texas on 2/24/10
Answer:
by Texas Heart Institute cardiologist, Christopher M. Frank, MD
Ejection fraction is one of the most common measures of heart function, and refers to the amount of blood ejected from the heart on each beat. It can be measured or estimated by any of several techniques, including echocardiography, cardiac MRI, cardiac CT, ventriculography, and nuclear imaging with either MUGA, SPECT, or PET. Normal is any number over around 55-60%; in fact, many labs report higher values as simply "greater than 60%." Numbers in the seventies and eighties can reflect dehydration or medications that are causing the heart to work harder than normal; more frequently they are simply the normal value for a smaller patient who has a correspondingly smaller heart and therefore cardiac walls that are closer to one another to begin with - which causes measurement of the ejection fraction by certain modalities (particularly nuclear imaging) to overestimate the true value.
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Updated February 2010
