Regular paperRelation of left ventricular thickness to age and gender in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy
Section snippets
Selection of patients
The present study population was comprised of 239 consecutively enrolled adult patients with HC who were evaluated at the Minneapolis Heart Institute from 1981 to 2000, and who met the following criteria: (1) a technically satisfactory 2-dimensional echocardiogram at or near study entry, to permit reliable identification of the distribution and extent of LV hypertrophy9, 11, 25, 26; and (2) ≥18 years of age at initial echocardiographic study.
Diagnosis of HC was made by echocardiography based on
Relation between age and extent of left ventricular hypertrophy
In the overall study group of 239 patients, an inverse relation was identified between age and both maximal LV wall thickness (r = −0.17; p = 0.007) and the calculated LV wall thickness index (r = −0.16; p = 0.017) (i.e., both measures of LV hypertrophy decreased progressively with greater patient age) (TABLE 1, TABLE 2).
Maximal LV wall thickness and the wall thickness index were significantly higher in the youngest age subgroup (18 to 39 years) compared with the oldest patient subgroup (≥75
Discussion
The present cross-sectional study in a large regional and unselected adult HC population establishes a modest but statistically significant inverse relation between age and LV wall thickness, and underscores the important principle in HC that LV hypertrophy is a dynamic (i.e., not static) feature of the disease. Younger adults showed substantially more severe (and diffuse) LV hypertrophy than older patients, as evidenced by maximal wall thickness as well as the wall thickness index (a measure
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