Purpose or Case Report: Morphological and functional carotid artery alteration can occur already in youth ages, essentially in presence of cardiovascular risk factors. Studies have showed that sonographic assessment of carotid artery (CA) Intima-Media Thickness (IMT) serves as prognostic factors for cardio-vascular disease also in youth patient population. As functional changes occur earlier than vessel wall morphological changes, this might be indicated by a decrease in vessel elasticity prior to the increase of IMT. This hypothesis indicates to use an early functional parameter for cardiovascular risk assessment.
This study was designed to assess and evaluate IMT as well as CA vessel elasticity in three groups, in young sportsmen and youth volunteers without any cardio-vascular risk factors (CV-RF) comparing to youth volunteers with CV-RF.
Methods & Materials: 60 subjects (14-35 years) were enrolled: 27 sportsmen, 16 youth volunteers with and 17 without CV-RF respectively. IMT was determined by B-Mode-US. Vessel elasticity was characterized by vessel flexibility index (VFI): minimal (Min) and maximal (Max) CA cross-sectional area values were obtained with B-Mode sonography during the cardiac cycle and afterward VFI was calculated on the following way: VFI = (Min*100)/Max.
Results: Mean and SD values for IMT were in volunteers without and with CV-RF and in sportsmen 0.42 ± 0.04 mm; 0.48 ± 0.06 mm; and 0.27 mm ± 0.05 mm respectively.
Mean and SD values VFI was found in volunteers without and with CV-RF and in sportsmen 21.53 ± 3.94%; 17.7% ± 3.5%; and 27.05% ± 4.15% respectively.
For IMT and VFI significant differences (p<0.05) were found between volunteers without and with CV-RF, percentage difference was found 14.6% and 21.6% respectively.
Conclusions: VFI and IMT were able to discriminate between all groups, but VFI scored better than IMT (bigger percentage difference). Therefore VFI could serve as a more sensitive parameter characterising cardio-vascular risk, but to prove this statement more data is needed.