Diagnostic value of R wave amplitude changes in coronary artery disease

According to the “Brody effect”, which states that intracavitary blood mass influences the effective heart mean lead vector, and also due to the recently reported effects of intramyocardial altered conduction in ischemic condition, R wave amplitude may increase during the stress test in CAD patients. In spite of the previous statements, many researches during the last decades have been unable to find any R wave amplitude change to assess CAD patients. The proposed methodology considering trend series analysis allows to approach several electrocardiographic parameters, hemodynamic responses and symptoms, facilitating the correlation among them and the evaluation of behavior in each parameter. In this work, a sample of 17 CAD patients and 14 healthy subjects assessed by clustering analysis and McNemar test has shown adequate ability in group discrimination. The results obtained from the authors´ dataset have shown an enhanced quality in the diagnosis ability of the stress test when R wave amplitude changes parameters are used in the analysis