الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
”Patients undergoing maintenance hemodialysis develop both structural and functional cardiovascular abnormalities. Despite improvement of dialysis technology, cardiovascular mortality of this population remains high. The pathophysiological mechanisms of these changes are complex especially the longterm uremic state, which may affect the cardiovascular system. There are many cardiovascular changes that occur in chronic kidney disease including left ventricular hypertrophy, myocardial fibrosis, microvascular disease, accelerated atherosclerosis and arteriosclerosis. These structural and functional changes in patients receiving chronic dialysis make them more susceptible to myocardial ischemia.Transthoracic and Doppler echocardiography evaluation generally show normal results in the early stages of cardiac involvement. Cardiac dysfunction in the subclinical stage may be recognized using methods such as speckle-tracking echocardiography. Early diagnosis of patients with evidence of cardiac dysfunction would be advantageous. Therefore, it might be beneficial for the early start of effective treatment. Four recently published studies evaluated the ventricular function in patients with chronic kidney disease, using speckle-tracking echocardiography. To the best of our knowledge this was the first study to evaluate cardiovascular autonomic neuropathy in non-diabetic chronic hemodialysis patients and it’s relation to subclinical left ventricular dysfunction evaluated by speckle-tracking echocardiography.