Introduction: Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction still remains a diagnostic challenge to many cardiologists. Many patients present to specialist advice accuse exertional dyspnea and decreased exercise tole-rance. Left ventricular diastolic dysfunction is conside-red the main cause of this type of failure. However, of-ten the patients complaining of heart failure either have the first degree of diastolic dysfunction or the diastolic dysfunction is not present at rest. The studies capturing target diastolic parameters changes, especially using stress echocardiography in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction are relatively poor. This area requires further investigation to discover new evaluation para-meters with reliability, specificity and high sensitivity.

Methods: The ongoing study is a prospective one type case-control and recruits in last 8 months, known or suspected subjects with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction and a control group of healthy sub-jects. Up to now, the group of subjects with heart fai-lure has 15 patients, and the control group contain 15 healthy subjects. We performed clinical assessment, laboratory bioclinic tests, resting and stress echocardi-ography using the cyclogergometer for all patients. We evaluated the usual parameters for diastolic dysfunc-tion and a parameter frequently studied in last 5 years appointed B-lines. We excluded patients with moderate or severe valve disease and patients with lung disease.

Results: There was a statistically significant correlation between the occurrence or increase of the number of B-lines and the occurrence of early symptomatology during the stress test, respectively the E/e` increase in patients with heart failure with preserved ejection frac-tion (p<0.05).

Conclusions: T he partial results obtained in this on-going study shows that B-lines are correlated with di-astolic dysfunction and could be used as a marker of risk in the development of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction.