Regional Cardiac Dilatation after Infarct

To the Editor: In an interesting and important study, Eaton et al.* have established a relation between acute myocardial-infarct expansion, determined by cross-sectional echocardiography, and clinical outcome. Their patient population consisted of two groups with transmural myocardial infarction evaluated regionally by cross-sectional echocardiography. One patient subset had a high mortality rate and exhibited distinct topographic expansion of the echocardiographically derived dysfunctioning segment after acute infarction, whereas the other subset had no appreciable infarct expansion and virtually no mortality. The authors could not determine a difference between the two subsets in terms of “clinical features and apparent infarct size.” One important.