Morphological and Functional Adaptation of the Maternal Heart During Pregnancy

Abstract

Pregnancy is a physiological process associated with increased cardiac performance and progressive LV remodeling. These changes are not directly reflected by parameters traditionally considered to describe systolic function, such as ejection fraction and longitudinal deformation. While ejection fraction was insensitive to the functional changes, the transient decrease in longitudinal deformation becomes only plausible when considering the changes in LV geometry.