What to Know About Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy in Kids

The human heart is a muscle, but it’s also a kind of complicated balloon—a balloon that fills and empties roughly 60 to 100 times every minute, and several billion times during the course of a lifetime. Among people with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the walls of the heart muscle are abnormally thick. This thickness can interfere with the heart’s normal filling-and-emptying operation. “If you think of a balloon made with super-thick rubber, you have to blow harder to fill it, and it’s the same with a hypertrophic heart,” says Dr. Daphne Hsu, professor of pediatrics and medicine at Pediatric Heart Center of Montefiore/Einstein in New York.  [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is the most common form of genetic heart disease in the U.S. and the second commonest heart-muscle disease among children. Roughly 1 out of 500 adults is thought to be living with it. It’s unclear exactly how many American kids have the condition, but experts estimate its prevalence somewhere in the neighborhood of three cases per 100,000 children. That makes it a very rare disease. However, despite its uncommonness, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is one of the leading causes of sudden death in young athletes. While it’s true that the condition can in some cases be life-threatening, it can also be almost very mild. “A lot of patients do not have many symptoms and their quality of life is good,” Hsu sa...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized freelance healthscienceclimate Source Type: news