Five thousand echocardiograms: what have we done?

This article describes the use of transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) in a series of 5,000 consecutive echocardiograms in a mid-sized UK district general hospital. The report highlights the basic demographics, reasons for the requests, yield of abnormal results and sources of the requests. The authors comment on the percentage of abnormal results for the different request categories and on how TTE can be best utilised as a cardiac investigation.