Prevalence of Abnormal Heart Weight After Sudden Death in People Younger than 40 Years of Age.

ABSTRACT: Background After sudden cardiac death in people aged <40 years, heart weight is a surrogate for cardiomegaly and a marker for cardiomyopathy. However, thresholds for cardiomegaly based on heart weight have not been validated in a cohort of cases of sudden cardiac death in young people. Methods and Results We surveyed medical examiner offices to determine which tools were used to assess heart weight norms. The survey determined that there was no gold standard for cardiomegaly (52 centers reported 22 different methods). We used a collection of heart weight data from sudden deaths in the Northwestern Sudden Death Collaboration (NSDC) to test the 22 methods. We found that the methods reported in our survey had little consistency: they classified between 18% and 81% of NSDC hearts with cardiome

SUBMITTER: Schoppen ZJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7726998 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature