INTRODUCTION
Significant progress has been made with the tools in diagnosis and management of heart failure. One of these advances is the prevention of sudden cardiac death (SCD) with implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICD).1 Regardless, the long-term mortality rates in heart failure patients, even with ICD, continue to remain as high as 50% at 10 years.2 These trends are worse in ischemic (ICM) than in nonischemic (NICM) forms of cardiomyopathy (CMP).3 It may not be right to simplify the burden of coronary artery disease (CAD) in patients with cardiomyopathies as a binary component of epicardial stenosis of more than or less than 70%, and thus attribute the heart failure to ischemic or nonischemic aetiologies.4 There is ongoing research on ways to detect ischemia in cardiomyopathies.5 The studies on prognosis of concomitant CAD in dilated cardiomyopathies (DCM) are few and these studies have reported the prognosis of the association of CAD in only idiopathic DCM. 6-8 Thus, the effect of moderate CAD coexisting with DCM with definite non-ischemic triggers is largely unexplored. The resultant phenotype of ‘mixed cardiomyopathy’ might identify clinical and outcome characteristics that are distinct from ICM or NICM and may impact on clinical management. This phenotype is gaining attention of late and the prognosis in terms of increased ventricular arrhythmia burden seems to parallel ICM.9,10 We aim to study the demographic, clinical, device therapies and survival characteristics of mixed CMP in a cohort of patients implanted with a defibrillator.