It has long been recognized that hypertension is commonly accompanied by enlargement of the left ventricle. The cause for cardiac hypertrophy has been studied in recent years and the condition appears to be due solely to hypertrophy of the individual fibers rather than to hyperplasia. If this is correct, it would seem that some direct relationship between the height of the blood pressure, the degree of left ventricular enlargement and the width of the muscle fiber should exist. However, there has been surprisingly little study to establish such a relationship. To date the number of observations is insufficient to permit the application of statistical methods to this problem.
Pässler and Heinecke,1 in their classic study of the relationship between cardiac hypertrophy and hypertension in partially nephrectomized dogs, employed the ratio of the weight of the left ventricle to the weight of the right ventricle as an index of hypertrophy