Hypertension and primary myocardial disease in congestive cardiac failure.
This study has tried to use end diastolic diameter the index of chamber dilatation to discriminate between hypertensive heart failure and diluted cardiomyopathy as both conditions are known to overlap in cases of congestive cardiac failure. The sensitivity, specificity and positive predictive value was 66.7%, 68% and 66.7% respectively. This means that alone, end diastolic diameter is not a very acute discriminator in cases where an overlap as shown in the figure occurs. It is therefore necessary to use all discriminatory indices in combination to get better accuracy.