Usefulness of Tissue Doppler Imaging to Identify Low Risk Patients with Diagnosis of

Differentiating hypertrophic cardiomyopathy from athlete's heart: An electrocardiographic and echocardiographic approach

“…Our study has several limitations: A) the population only included men, due to the low prevalence of mild ventricular hypertrophy found in women; B) the population was only Caucasian, and it is not possible to extrapolate our findings to a population with different heart characteristics, such as the African population previously described [27]; C) the sample of HCM patients was small because of the low prevalence of this subgroup of HCM patients with mild to moderate hypertrophy [10]; D) we could not assess the presence of late gadolinium enhancement on CMR, because not all of the participants in the athletes group completed the study; therefore, sub-analysis of the data did not add information; E) as a retrospective study, the echocardiographic parameters useful for differential diagnosis of HCM were not assessed systematically in the HCM group, such as diastolic function [28], tissue doppler [29] and strain rate [30]; for this reason, we decided not to include these parameters in the final analysis; F) it is important to mention that genetic testing was not available to help confirm that diagnosis, which was based solely on the assessment of family history and complementary studies.…”