Diastolic dysfunction occurs early in the onset of heart failure. In the past, diastolic dysfunction has often been defined per exclusionem as heart failure in the absence of evidence of systolic dysfunction. This definition may be appropriate for clinical diagnosis if concentric or eccentric LV hypertrophy co-exists, but it is physiologically misleading, since diastolic dysfunction continues to persist or even worsens with the onset of systolic dysfunction. It should be considered that symptoms in heart failure are more closely related to diastolic than to systolic dysfunction. Furthermore, also prognosis of heart failure seems to be more closely related to the underlying degree of diastolic rather than systolic dysfunction. Despite its clinical importance, however, large trials on treatment outcome for diastolic heart failure (such as the CHARM-preserved and PEP-CHF trials) are scarce and disappointing. Among numerous others, three important reasons for this data scarcity are: overestimation of end-point events in the power analyses of the respective trials, lack of therapeutic agents that specifically target diastolic dysfunction, and lack of simple echocardiographic parameters capable of measuring diastolic function independently from loading conditions. The latter will be addressed in the study presented here. As will be detailed below, early-diastolic function is inextricably linked to the end-systolic conditions of the ventricle. An echocardiographic parameter describing an early-diastolic mechanical event is therefore very likely to vary with changes in end-systolic conditions. The present study will investigate new parameters of early-diastolic function by provoking contractility changes.