What is the most important thing you want to know from the echocardiogram?

One thing which is very obvious, we all want to know what our Ejection Fraction is. Ejection means- what you kick out or what you reject. When heart pumps, it kicks out or pumps out the blood to rest of the body and it does not completely empty but it kicks out about 70% of the blood which goes through rest of the body. Blood pressure rises to 120 and then as heart relaxes, blood pressure falls down to 80 mmHg and heart starts filling up with the blood. This cycle continues. Ejection fraction is very important for all of us. If our ejection fraction is 30%, then we cannot walk from one room to another without feeling very short of breath and our life expectancy is few years only, unless we
do some major intervention. Such a person will actually meet the criteria for heart transplant
also.
We want to know the function of the valves. Heart has four valves which make sure that the blood always goes in one direction. It does not leak back. It closes and opens smoothly. An ultrasound can tell us right away, especially, the color ultrasound can even tell us any leakage or any turbulence in the blood which should not happen in a normal healthy heart. Third important thing what is we want to look for and it
should not be there, is a thickening of the heart muscle walls. The muscles becoming thicker and stronger is good for our hands and feet or upper extremity and lower extremity, but it is not good for our heart, because heart has a very limited blood supply and if anytime we increase the thickness of our muscles as we do by exercising or weightlifting, then blood supply also catches up. But, that is not true for the heart. So, what we are looking for is a normal thickness of the heart muscle and if muscle is thicker than normal then most important reason is usually the high blood pressure.