Our understanding of the genetic basis of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) has evolved rapidly. This has resulted from a combination of dedicated research in well phenotyped CVD patients, the sequencing of the human genome, and the ready accessibility and decreasing cost of next-generation sequencing technologies. This [...]
Overdiagnosis causes well people to be labelled as abnormal or diseased with possible adverse psychosocial and financial consequences, and usually results in overtreatment with possible physical harms. It may occur because of overdetection because of increased sensitivity of a new test, and/or overdefinition because of [...]
In patients with symptoms of stable angina, cardiac stress testing and angiography have been recommended to evaluate for inducible myocardial ischemia and obstructive coronary artery disease (CAD). Walter and colleagues investigated whether high-sensitivity cardiac troponin (hs-cTn) tests could be introduced in this diagnostic pathway.
Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a primary myocardial disorder which can present at any age. Although the prevalence is estimated to be 1 in 500 in adults, it is far less common in young children. HCM is frequently caused by pathogenic variants in the sarcomere genes [...]
When a doctor performs an echocardiogram, about one per cent of people will be found to have a 'spongy heart' — typically benign, but sometimes associated with other heart problems. When a more sensitive MRI test is used, the number of people with spongy heart shoots as [...]
The prevalence of LVNC is higher than expected for a rare disease in all population cohorts. There are at least three major factors which appear to strongly influence the high prevalence of LVNC including the type of imaging modality used, the characteristics of the cohort [...]
Overdiagnosis occurs when persons are labeled with a technically correct diagnosis that does not improve health outcomes. It is a common unintended consequence of early disease detection in asymptomatic persons but also takes place in persons with mild or ambiguous symptoms. Despite initiatives to prevent [...]
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention guidelines are generally based on the absolute risk of a CVD event, but there is increasing interest in using ‘heart age’ to motivate lifestyle change when absolute risk is low. Previous studies have not compared heart age to 5-year absolute risk, [...]
We reviewed the reliability of online heart disease risk calculators and the increasing popularity of “heart age” calculators, which assess 4 out of 5 people as having an older heart age than their current age. The papers explain how these calculations are highly variable [...]