Dr. Istrail
Jan 2, 20231 min
After 1.5 years of work, I'm excited to announce that our right atrial pressure study was published in the Journal of the American Society of Echo:
A novel method for estimating right atrial pressure with point-of-care ultrasound.
We showed that a 2-minute simple bedside POCUS technique can estimate the right atrial pressure within 3 mmHg in most patients. Though we did not compare it directly to the IVC estimation, a recent blinded study of IVC measurement vs gold standard right heart cath measurements suggests that this new method is significantly more accurate. It also has a few other benefits:
It is obtainable in 100% of patients since the jugular vein is so superficial and easy to see
It is not obstructed by bowel gas or affected by morbid obesity
It offers a quantitative estimate of actual pressure as opposed to a qualitative estimate of low, normal, or high.
We've made a short video highlighting the method and going through two example cases:
Happy 2023!