Cardiomyopathies

The cardiomyopathies are a heterogeneous collection of heart muscle disorders with diverse genetic and non-genetic aetiologies. The advent of next-generation sequencing has transformed our understanding of the mechanisms of disease underlying many forms of cardiomyopathy, accelerated clinical testing capacity and unlocked the prospect of personalized medicine based on knowledge of an individual's genetic variants. Cardiovascular imaging with echocardiography and cardiac magnetic resonance imaging plays a fundamental role in diagnosis, risk stratification and therapy guidance in the cardiomyopathies. The current management of patients with inherited cardiomyopathies is beginning to integrate knowledge of individual genomic profiles with advances in cardiovascular imaging. This has enhanced surveillance potential for high-risk individuals and begun to facilitate diagnosis, appropriate risk stratification and prognostication. This review introduces the cardiomyopathies, focusing on hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, dilated cardiomyopathy, restrictive cardiomyopathy, arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy and left ventricular non-compaction, giving an overview of their aetiological complexity, diagnosis and contemporary clinical management.