Analysis of alternative start-site detection by 5′RNA-seq using RNA from cardiomyopathy patients and rodent models revealed further that FHL1A exists in two variants, a transcript that is expressed basally in healthy hearts (transcript 3, bFHL1), and a slightly larger version of FHL1A (transcript 2, iFHL1) that bears 48 additional nucleotides or 16 extra amino acids at the N terminus of the protein, whose expression was highly induced in all investigated cardiomyopathy types (Christodoulou et al. 2014; Domenighetti et al. 2014). Here, FHL1 is linked to cardiomyopathy.