How Common Is Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy?

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Cardiomyopathy refers to diseases of the heart muscle. HCM is one of 4 primary "cardiomyopathies" - the other include dilated (thin walls that do not pump well), restrictive (stiff walls that do not relax well), Arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (fatty fibrosis in the right ventricle).

Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy is a not an uncommon heart disease. Publications from the 2000's indicate that HCM is the most common of all genetic heart conditions affecting over 1 in 500 people in the general population. Based on these data we may estimate that between 700K and 725K  people in the United States have HCM.

Subsequent studies have also proven that HCM has a prevalence of 1 in 500 in a wide variety of populations including, Native Americans, Chinese, Rural Midwestern US, and others. There is no gender, age, or ethnic factor specific to HCM, HCM is an equal opportunity disease.

The number 1 in 500 comes from the body of echocardiogram data, meaning researchers would look at thousands of echocardiograms to see how many hearts had the clinical signs of HCM.

Today, we have 2 new technologies that have shown HCM may be even more common than originally thought, the cardiac MRI and genetic testing.

When looking at all the data collected, the number of those with clinical HCM either on echocardiogram or MRI and those with a genetic marker for HCM, the number of those with HCM may increase to 1 in 200 to 300 - this data is still in process. We can estimate HCM is present in nearly 1 million+ in the USA and  36 million or more worldwide.

 

Figure 5 indicates that even using the older data at 1 in 500, HCM is more common than many diseases that have greater name recognition.

 

 

 

 

This image explains the previous studies done world wide to arrive at the prevelance of HCM being 1 in 500.

 

However, new data published in 2015 updates this data to bring HCM up to 1 in 250 or more.

 

Citations:
Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Registry: The rationale and design of an international, observational study of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.Kramer CM, Appelbaum E, Desai MY, Desvigne-Nickens P, DiMarco JP, Friedrich MG, Geller N, Heckler S, Ho CY, Jerosch-Herold M, Ivey EA, Keleti J, Kim DY, Kolm P, Kwong RY, Maron MS, Schulz-Menger J, Piechnik S, Watkins H, Weintraub WS, Wu P, Neubauer S.
Am Heart J. 2015 Aug;170(2):223-30. doi: 10.1016/j.ahj.2015.05.01

 

HCMA 6/2021