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Medical Definition of Ventricular afterload
1. Formerly, the arterial pressure or some other measure of the force that a ventricle must overcome while it contracts during ejection, contributed to by aortic or pulmonic artery impedance, peripheral vascular resistance, and mass and viscosity of blood; now, more rigorously expressed in terms of the wall stress, i.e., the tension per unit cross-sectional area in the ventricular muscle fibres (calculated by an expansion of Laplace's law utilizing pressure, internal radius, and wall thickness) that is required to produce the intracavitary pressure required during ejection. (05 Mar 2000)