Scientists at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine together with an international research team from Sardinia and Munich have discovered 10 gene variations that may give information about a person’s risk of sudden cardiac death, a cardiovascular disorder with no clinical warnings that claims more than 250,000 people in the US every year.

 

Among risk factors leading to sudden cardiac death are obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and smoking. But with the new study, it appears that genetics also plays a role, a significant one, in dying from cardiac arrest.

 

The researchers used DNA samples previously collected for epidemiological studies to analyze the genomes of 15,842 individuals whose QT intervals had been measured by electrocardiogram. QT interval reflects the time it takes for the heart to contract and then reset for the next heartbeat.

 

The study showed that the more of these 10 variants a person has, the greater the risk of having a prolonged QT interval. People with prolonged QT have a higher chance of dying from cardiac arrest.

 

“The problem in some sense is most of these people have no known risk factors. They don’t have high cholesterol. They are not obese. In some sense, the genetics may be the only hope for some of these people,” said Dan Arking of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who was one of the lead authors of the study.

 

The next thing on the researchers’ list of priorities is to find out more information about each of these genes and how important they are in raising the risk of cardiac death and then to find new drugs to reverse this risk.