Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is invariably accompanied by cardiomyopathy, the most frequent cause of death. An American team looked at the kinetics of cardiac involvement by longitudinally analysing cardio-MRI images of 59 children with DMD with a median age of 5.6 years. Compared to images from a control group of healthy subjects, it appears that :
- the high resolution of the 3 Tesla machines allows the visualisation of subclinical lesions very early in the growth of the children;
- the composite circumferential tension index used for the study was more often deteriorated in the lower part of the myocardium;
- this imaging deterioration precedes the appearance of signs of left ventricular dysfunction by several years.
