Athletes with Repolarization Abnormalities

To the Editor: Pelliccia et al. (Jan. 10 issue) 1 report long-term follow-up data on 81 athletes with deeply inverted T waves on electrocardiograms (ECGs), who had no apparent cardiac disease, selected from a cohort of 12,550 trained athletes. Among these 81 athletes, 5 (6%) ultimately proved to have cardiomyopathies, and 3 of the 5 had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. We would like to reconsider the relation between deeply inverted T waves and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in apparently healthy young persons, whether or not they are athletes. In our opinion, myocardial hypertrophy does not represent the true hypertrophic cardiomyopathy phenotype. Geisterfer-Lowrance et al. 2 have . . .