Children
Beyond the Normal Ejection Fraction: Can Strain Echocardiography Unmask Early Myocardial Impairment in Adolescents with Substance-Use Disorders
By Oğuzhan Ay, Ecem İnce Arslan, Enis Sargın and 1 others.
Abstract
Background
Substance use among adolescents is a growing global health problem, and psychoactive substances may damage the myocardium before conventional echocardiographic parameters change. We aimed to determine whether two-dimensional speckle-tracking strain echocardiography can unmask early myocardial impairment in adolescents with substance-use disorder.
Methods
In this retrospective cross-sectional case–control study, 29 adolescents with substance-use disorder followed at a Child and Adolescent Substance Dependence Treatment Center and 29 age- and sex-matched healthy controls underwent conventional echocardiography and strain analysis (segmental, territorial, and global longitudinal strain [GLS]) performed by two blinded pediatric cardiologists. Between-group comparisons were adjusted for multiple testing; discriminative performance was assessed by receiver operating characteristic analysis with bootstrap internal validation, and multivariable logistic regression tested the independence of the association.