Stroke Volume Reveals Cardiac Risk That Ejection Fraction Alone Will Miss
After a major heart attack, a single stroke volume measurement helps predict cardiovascular death within a year, and it does this independently of left ventricular ejection fraction, the metric most people associate with heart health. In patients with high stroke volume after an anterior heart attack, the negative predictive value for cardiovascular death at 12 months is approximately 99%. If stroke volume is preserved, the chance of dying from cardiac causes in the following year is vanishingly small. Yet most patients have never heard of stroke volume. It rarely surfaces in everyday health conversations the way blood pressure or cholesterol does. Recent clinical evidence, though, makes a strong case that it belongs front and center in cardiovascular risk assessment, from the ICU to routine outpatient follow-up.