Clinical utility, safety, acceptability and complications of transoesophageal echocardiography (TEE) in 901 patients.
Transoesophageal echocardiography (TEE) has earned an important role in the evaluation of patients with cardiovascular diseases. We report our TEE experience in 901 patients who had suboptimal transthoracic echocardiographic studies performed between September 1989 and June 1993. The patient-population consisted of 459 females and 442 males, with an ethnic distribution of Chinese 76.5%, Malays 12.7%, Indians 8.5% and Others 2.3%. The mean age was 48 years. The main indications for TEE were: cardiac source of embolism (27.5%); native valve pathology (19.1%); atrial septal abnormality (9.7%); infective endocarditis (8.3%); intracardiac masses (7.0%); prosthetic valve dysfunction (6.3%); congenital heart diseases (4.6%); aortic diseases (3.4%) and miscellaneous (14.1%). The majority of the studies were done on in- and out-patients, with only 1.2% performed in the intensive care area and 1% intraoperatively. 82.6% of TEE intubation were accomplished within one minute and most of the TEE studies were completed within twenty minutes. There were ten failures (1.2%). Major complications occurred in 5 patients (0.6%) but there was no mortality. 90.5% of the studies were considered by the operators as additionally-informative or useful for clinical decision making. In a subgroup analysis, 90.6% of the patients who had undergone TEE indicated their willingness for repeat studies if required and TEE was able to increase the sensitivity of detecting a potential cardioembolic source from 10.3% to 29.5%. In conclusion, with increasing experience, TEE can be performed expeditiously and safely, with good acceptability by our local population. TEE provides useful or additional information that supplements standard transthoracic echocardiography in a wide-ranging spectrum of cardiac conditions.