(3) Patients in the high-risk subgroup were not further evaluated. For example, those with nonsustained ventricular tachycardia in ambulatory Holter ECG might have been subjected to an invasive electrophysiologic study and the appropriate treatment (drugs and/or implantable cardioverter defibrillator) might have been guided by the results. However, the incidence of sudden cardiac death was low in this study and this might be related to the fact that family histoiy of sudden cardiac death was present in only 11% of the study patients compared with 30% in previous reports. (4) The mean follow-up in this study was only 74 months (<7 years) vs >15 years in the study from Tuscany. This might have affected the incidence of several cardiovascular events, including that of atrial fibrillation that increases with follow-up duration. A longer follow-up of this cohort is necessary before comparisons to the other longitudinal studies can be made. canadian neighbor pharmacy
In conclusion, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in Greece has a relatively benign clinical course. Similar findings have been reported in previous studies on unselected patient populations conducted in different countries. However, there is no doubt that the clinical course of the disease differs between pedigrees within the same country and between patients within the same pedigree. These discrepancies underscore the need for prognostic analysis of large kindreds of patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in relation to phenotypic and genotypic characteristics and strengthen the requirement for the creation of national and international hypertrophic cardiomyopathy databases.