Contractility
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Myocardial Contractility is a term used in physiology to describe the performance of cardiac muscle.
It is often defined in the following roundabout way:
The determinants of myocardial performance are:
- Heart rate
- Preload
- Afterload
- Contractility - Is the intrinsic ability of a cardiac muscle fibre to contract at any given fibre length.
It might be thought that a better definition would be that Contractility is the property that represents the strength of myocardial contraction. However, this definition does not separate contractility from the other loading factors that affect the strength of myocardial contraction. In particular, an increase in preload results in an increased force of contraction - this is Starling's law of the heart - but this does not require a change in contractility.
Any chemicals that affects contractility is called inotropic agent. For example drugs such as catecholamines (norepinephrine and epinephrine) that enhance contractility are considered to have a positive inotropic effect.
The concept of Contractility was necessary to explain why some interventions (e.g. an adrenaline infusion) could cause an increase in myocardial performance even if, as could be shown in experiments, the preload, afterload and heart rate were all held constant. Experimental work controlling the other factors was necessary because a change in contractility is generally not an isolated effect.
For example:
- An increase in sympathetic stimulation to the heart increases contractility AND heart rate.
- An increase in contractility tends to increase stroke volume and thus a secondary decrease in preload.
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