magicbastarder
1st April 2004, 10:44 AM
How do you tell a healthy heart from one that could stop without warning? By measuring variations in the length of the heartbeat, according to a team of researchers in Greece.
The finding could provide a way to screen for people at risk of sudden cardiac death. Such people's heartbeat often looks perfectly healthy by conventional criteria.
Yet a quarter of a million people die each year in the US alone when their heart suddenly stops and, like the soccer player Marc-Vivien Foe who collapsed and died in 2003 while playing for Cameroon, many of them have had no history of heart problems.
Even a person's ECG, or electrocardiogram, can look normal for much of the time. In patients with Brugada syndrome, for example, abnormal electrical signals sporadically stop their hearts from pumping properly. Long QT syndrome is a similar condition, which can strike young, fit adults, and has also been linked to cot death.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994832
The finding could provide a way to screen for people at risk of sudden cardiac death. Such people's heartbeat often looks perfectly healthy by conventional criteria.
Yet a quarter of a million people die each year in the US alone when their heart suddenly stops and, like the soccer player Marc-Vivien Foe who collapsed and died in 2003 while playing for Cameroon, many of them have had no history of heart problems.
Even a person's ECG, or electrocardiogram, can look normal for much of the time. In patients with Brugada syndrome, for example, abnormal electrical signals sporadically stop their hearts from pumping properly. Long QT syndrome is a similar condition, which can strike young, fit adults, and has also been linked to cot death.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994832