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The following is a summary of “Relationship between left ventricular shape and cardiovascular risk factors: comparison between the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis and UK Biobank,” published in the January 2025 issue of Cardiology by Suinesiaputra et al. 

Researchers conducted a retrospective study to compare left ventricular (LV) shapes in patients with different cardiovascular risk factor profiles across 2 cohorts and to assess whether LV shape scores from a reference cohort could be applied to another cohort for shape comparison.  

They included 2 cardiac MRI cohorts: 2,106 participants (median age 65 years, 54% women) from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) and 2,960 participants (median age 64 years, 52% women) from the UK Biobank (UKB) study. The LV shape atlases were created using 3D LV models based on expert-drawn contours from separate core labs. Atlases were deemed generalizable for a risk factor if the area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) showed no significant difference (P >0.05) between internal (within-cohort) and external (cross-cohort) cases.  

The results showed that the LV mass and volume indices significantly differed between cohorts, even in age- and sex-matched cases without risk factors, likely due to varying core lab analysis protocols. For the UKB atlas, internal and external discriminative performance was similar for hypertension (AUC: 0.77 vs 0.76, P =0.37), diabetes (AUC: 0.79 vs 0.77, P =0.48), hypercholesterolemia (AUC: 0.76 vs 0.79, P =0.38), and smoking (AUC: 0.69 vs 0.67, p=0.18). For the MESA atlas, diabetes (AUC: 0.79 vs 0.74, P =0.09) and hypercholesterolemia (AUC: 0.75 vs 0.70, P =0.10) were not significantly different. Both atlases showed significant differences in obesity.  

Investigators concluded the MESA and UKB cardiac atlases exhibited good generalizability for diabetes and hypercholesterolemia, without necessitating corrections for mass and volume differences, while observed discrepancies in obesity prevalence may be attributed to variations in the association between obesity and cardiac morphology across cohorts. 

Source: heart.bmj.com/content/early/2025/01/15/heartjnl-2024-324658