At the Association for Molecular Pathology's annual meeting in San Jose last week, Harvard Medical School's Jonathan Seidman made a case for the importance of studying rare genetic variants that cause cardiomyopathy. Various genes cause different pathway mutations that lead to cardiomyopathy, Seidman said, and cardiologists can't distinguish between them. While there are several common variants, there are multiple rare variants that can significantly increase a patient's chances of suffering from the disease.