doi:10.1155/2012/578504 Clinical Study Differential Short-Term Repeated ForearmHyperaemic Reactivity in Coronary Artery Disease Patients Compared to

Copyright © 2012 Simon L. Bacon et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The hyperaemic response of the forearm is a widely used technique to assess the vascular reactivity. Little is known about the short-term reproducibility and the possible exhaustion of this response in normal or diseased states. As such, the current study was conducted to assess this phenomenon using a unique nuclear medicine- (NM-) based technique. 19 patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) undergoing NM exercise stress tests and 15 low risk (LR) participants completed 2 reactive hyperaemia tests, using a SPECT-based technique, separated by 15 min. Analyses revealed that CAD patients had lower hyperaemic responses than LR participants (P <.001), and that there was a significant group × time interaction (P <.005), such that LR participants showed a larger decrease in the reactivity (5.2 ± 0.4 to 3.6 ± 0.4) than the CAD patients (2.9 ± 0.3 to 2.6 ± 0.3). These results suggest tha