Turns Out that Body Size Is Correlated with Heart Size

Setting normal cardiac dimensions is more than an academic exercise, as these are important for diagnosing hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and have dramatic implications for the screening of our young athletes. Controversy exists as to whether cardiac dimensions are related to body size; for adults, criteria for left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) and HCM are not related to body size. In addition, the criteria for upper limits of normal for the athletic heart are largely based on European studies of relatively racially unmixed cohorts.

These researchers analyzed observational data from rest and stress echocardiograms in 526 National Basketball Association (NBA) players in 2013 and 2014 (mean age, 26). Most of the cohort were black (n=406; 7…