Mouse heart valve structure and function: echocardiographic and morphometric analyses from the fetus through the aged adult

摘要

In human valve disease, the majority of patients have a congenital malformation that can manifest as disease in the newborn or more commonly in the aged adult (11, 32). Echo-cardiography offers the advantage of longitudinal analysis, which provides important data regarding changes in functional status within a single organism and the development of latent disease over time (6, 30). Genetically modified mice used to evaluate the effects of gain or loss of function of genes known to be involved in valvulogenesis often die during embryogen-esis, limiting their applicability to human disease (17). However, increasingly sophisticated transgenic models using spatial and temporal regulation of gene expression (8, 49) and the appreciation of the importance of late fetal and early postnatal valve development (1, 18) have led to the search for viable models of valve disease that more closely recapitulate the human phenotype. In vitro analyses of valve morphology during fetal and juvenile mouse development have been described, and various outcome measures have been developed (5, 20, 26); however, these measures have not been systematically studied in a normal population or compared with standard echocardiographic data.