抄録
Arteriosclerosis is one of the most important disorders in clinical medicine, but at the present time there are only a few method for detecting the severity of the disorder without any surgical procedures.
In biophysical sense, arteriosclerosis can be understood as a loss of elasticity of the arterial wall. Therefore, arteriosclerosis can be reflected on a pulse wave velocity (PWV) of the artery along its longitudinal axis according to the Moens-Korteweg's equation. In this view point, we have studied a method measuring PWV of the aorta in living subjects. And there are fairy good correlation between the PWV and the pathological changes of the aorta and the difference between in ante- and post mortem in 169 cases was negligible with 0.86 by multivariate statistical analysis.
Thus, these facts indicated that the grade of sclerosis of the aorta of living subjects could be estimated by measuring PWV which could be done non invasively and quantitatively.
This paper represents the evaluation of effect of antisclerotic agent Elazyme by measuring aortic PWV for 18 to 24 months.
Materials were 46 patients with coronary sclerosis, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, aortic sclerosis and others aged from 39 to 80 years old, the mean PWV was 9.16±1.16m/sec with advanced sclerotic grade. The second materials were of 69 control subjects. These two groups were measured PWV, ECG, blood pressure and serum lipid periodically. Results:
1. The mean PWV of patients who were given the antisclerotic agent Elaszym decreased from 9.16±1.15m/sec to 8.81±0.91m/sec (after 6 months. P<0.05), 8.69±0.97m/sec (after 12 months, P<0.05), 8.68±0.82m/sec (after 18 months. P<0.05) and 8.52±0.81m/sec (after 24 months, P<0.05) respectively.
2. The mean PWV of control subjects did not showed significant changes; 8.43±1.12m/sec (0 month), 8.51±0.99m/sec (after 12 months. N. S.), 8.42±0.96m/sec (after 24 months, N. S.) 8.44±0.72m/sec (after 36 months, N. S.)
3. The mean values of serum lipids such as total cholesterol, trigly-ceride and β-lipoprotein decreased significantly.
