Outdated guidelines mean doctors failing to spot heart condition in women
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Research finds hypertrophic cardiomyopathy testing that overlooks sex differences and body size is inadequate. Doctors are failing to diagnose women with a potentially deadly heart condition because tests rely on outdated studies from the 1970s and do not account for natural differences in sex and body size.
Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a genetic condition where the muscular wall of the heart becomes thickened, making it harder for the heart to pump blood around the body. It affects one in 500 people, and can cause cardiac arrest and sudden death.
But research funded by the British Heart Foundation found current guidelines for diagnosing the condition were wholly inadequate. The findings were published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Two in three people diagnosed with HCM are men, but researchers said women were just as likely to have the condition.
HCM is diagnosed using a variety of tests and scans, such as measuring the thickness of the wall of the left ventricle, the heart’s main pumping chamber. For the past five decades, the threshold for diagnosing HCM has been 15mm for everyone. If the muscle is thicker than this, the patient is considered likely to have HCM.
Research found this was inadequate and did not account for natural differences in sex and body size. The study included 1,600 patients with HCM whose condition was examined using a new method, taking account of age, sex and size. Researchers found that the new method, which included AI reading thousands of heart scans, was particularly beneficial for women, increasing identification of HCM by 20 percentage points.
