DZHK TORCH-Plus is a Registry for Patients With Cardiomyopathies and Serves as Source for Cardiovascular Research Studies

The DZHK TranslatiOnal Registry for CardiomyopatHies (DZHK TORCH) represents a unique resource of clinical data and high quality biological samples to enable innovative clinical and molecular studies on cardiomyopathies (CMP). As a multi-center German cardiomyopathy registry, TORCH has been prospectively admitting patients since December 2014. 2,300 patients were recruited as planned. Taken together, patient data showed that the prevalence of these diseases is much higher in men than in women, atrial fibrillation is common in all forms of CMPs as well as rare forms of disease indicate a higher risk and higher morbidity.

This DZHK TORCH register is now to be expanded with a second phase (DZHK TORCH-Plus). The second phase DZHK TORCH-Plus consists of 4 main modules: 1. "Clinical phenotyping, follow-up & biosampling" 2. "Genomics", 3. "Inflammation" and 4. "Biomarker". The central aims are 1) to significantly increase the number of probands (n = 4340) in order to better address the different types of CMPs, especially patients with rare CMP forms such as LVNC and ARVC or with probably molecularly explainable cardiomyopathies (familial DCM), 2) to prolong the longitudinal with a further follow-up to achieve sufficient events and thereby derive clinical recommendations for risk assessment, 3) to increase the number of probands with state-of-the-art phenotyping, 4) to pinpoint the effect of myocardial inflammation, fibrosis, gender and to determine or predict genotypes based for outcome, 5) to validate novel biomarkers developed in other DZHK studies, and 6) to foster active cooperation with international CMP registries and partners from industry.