DECLARATIONS
Ethics approval and consent to participate : The study was
approved by the ethics committee at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden (DNR
2008/1695-31). All patients provided written informed consent
Consent for publication : Not Applicable
- Availability of data and material : Datasets generated during
and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available
but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request
- Competing interests : All authors declare no conflicts of
interests related to this study
- Funding : AV is supported by grants from the Swedish
Association for pulmonary hypertension; LHL is supported by grants
from the Swedish Research Council [grants 2013-23897-104604-23 and
523-2014-2336], Swedish Heart Lung Foundation [grants 20100419 and
20120321], Stockholm County Council [grants 20110120 and
20140220] and Swedish Society of Medicine [grants 174111 and
504881]
- Authors’ contributions : AB and AV conceptualized the study.
AV performed the echocardiographic examinations on all subjects. AB
and AV analysed the echocardiographic data. AV, LHL and PL contributed
substantially to the manuscript. All authors read and approved the
final manuscript.
- Acknowledgements : Not Applicable