Cardiac hypertrophy in idiopathic dilated congestive cardiomyopathy: a clinicopathologic study.

Although clinical studies indicate that patients with idiopathic dilated congestive cardiomyopathy who develop electrocardiographic or angiographic signs of left ventricular (LV) hypertrophy may survive longer, there is little morphologic evidence for such anatomic favorable of unfavorable prognostic groups. We studied 30 autopsied patients who died of dilated cardiomyopathy; of these, 15 died within 1 year of the first symptom of their disease (short-term survivors) and 15 patients died 1-14 years after initial symptoms (long-term survivors). There were no significant differences in sex, race, clinical presentation or cause of death between the groups, but there were significant morphologic differences. In the short-term survivors, average heart weight was 540 g and LV wall thickness was 1.0 cm, whereas in the long-term survivors, the average heart weight was 759 g and LV wall thickness was 1.3 cm (p less than 0.001). LV cavity dilatation as measured by maximal transverse diameter from the postmortem ang...