Heart Failure Across the Tree of Life: Insights for Human Cardiovascular Medicine

There is a major effort at present to genotype and phenotype human heart failure syndromes with anticipated implications for therapeutic strategy. Systematic evaluation of heart failure syndromes in other species may provide novel comparative insight in these efforts. This review presents phylogenies of species and breed-specific cardiomyopathies and myocardial failure developed from the results of reviews of cardiomyopathy and heart failure syndromes across chordates. Phylogenetic analyses of vulnerability to heart failure syndromes across species offer an expanded set of evolutionary observations into the nature of these disorders in humans. Comparative analyses of breed-specific vulnerability to cardiomyopathy and heart failure in dogs, cats, horses and other domestic species also present unique genomic and environmental insights highly relevant for human health. Heart failure from degenerative valve disease or dilated cardiomyopathy was frequently reported in dogs, while hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and acquired valvular disease were common findings in cats and horses, respectively. Greater knowledge exchange between human and veterinary cardiology is important to accelerate biomedical innovation aimed at addressing human heart failure.