Mitral regurgitation (MR) is a serious heart condition that often requires corrective surgery. It is characterized by the backflow or "regurgitation" of blood from the heart's left ventricle into the left atrium. Atrial functional (AFMR), characterized by normal mitral valve (MV) function and left ventricular function but with atrial dilation and defects in the ring-like structure that supports the MV leaflets (mitral annulus), poses diagnostic and therapeutic challenges due to its distinct pathophysiological mechanisms.
Historically, studies on AFMR have been limited by small sample sizes and single-center data, leading to variability in reported prevalence and . To address this gap, a team of researchers led by Associate Professor Nobuyuki Kagiyama from the Department of Cardiovascular Biology and Medicine at Juntendo University Graduate School of Medicine, Japan, collaborated with Tomohiro Kaneko and Tohru Minamino, also from the same department, alongside Minoru Tabata from the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at Juntendo University School of Medicine, and Yukio Abe from the Department of Cardiology at Osaka City General Hospital. Together, they conducted a analyzing echocardiographic reports of patients who underwent transthoracic echocardiography.
Their findings were on August 15, 2024, in Called the REVEAL-AFMR study, the team analyzed a vast dataset comprising 225,163 echocardiographic reports from 177,235 patients who underwent transthoracic echocardiography in 2.