CARDIOVASCULAR JOURNAL OF AFRICA • Vol 24, No 3, April 2013
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Letter to the Editor
Cardiomyopathies and myocardial disorders in Africa:
present status and the way forward
AO Falase and OS Ogah.
Cardiovasc J Afr
2012;
23
: 552–562
Dear Sir
I read with great interest the review by Falase and Ogah on
cardiomyopathies and myocardial disorders in Africa.
1
It is a
timely contribution to the ongoing discourse on the contemporary
status of heart muscle disease in Africa.
2,3
There are however
several issues that need to be addressed by the authors of the
review. The first relates to the statement by the authors that ‘there
are no reports of left ventricular non-compaction from Africa,
possibly because African cardiologists are not yet familiar with
its echocardiographic changes’. This statement is contrary to
the published literature. Over the past six years, there have
been several reports from different countries of African patients
with left ventricular non-compaction, including Djibouti, South
Africa and Sudan.
4-8
The second issue relates to the following statement in the
abstract and text of the review: ‘there are no reports of … ion
channelopathies inAfrica’. I would like to draw the authors to the
discovery of impaired endocytosis of the ion channel TRPM4 as
a cause of human progressive familial heart block type I in South
Africans.
9
This work by colleagues and their collaborators from
Stellenbosch University represents one of the most significant
contributions of African scientists to the understanding of the
pathogenesis of cardiac disease in recent times.
The third issue is one of clarification. The authors refer to
genotyping the ‘Hb’ gene in patients with cardiomyopathy. It is
not clear what the ‘Hb’ gene is, or the rationale for postulating
a linkage with cardiomyopathy. Information on the locus on the
gene map and laboratory conditions used for typing the gene
would assist other investigators in verifying the findings of the
authors.
The fourth issue from the review relates to the discussion of
the classification of cardiomyopathies. The authors propose a
new classification that is based on the proposal of the American
Heart Association.
10
It is curious that the authors have omitted any
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