New test helps diagnose 'sudden death syndrome'

Sudden death syndrome--an umbrella term for a range of heart conditions that can lead to cardiac arrest--is notorious for striking those who seem most fit.

That is because the condition, thought to be largely hereditary, is often triggered by overexertion. Tragically for some, the first symptom can be cardiac arrest.

It's possible, though costly, to screen for SDS. In fact, after soccer prodigy John Marshall died of a sudden heart attack at age 16 in 1994, the day before he was set to join Everton, testing became compulsory for professional athletes in several countries.

Good thing, especially for those who don't have the means that professional athletes do, that a doctor at Tel Aviv University may have just made testing for the condition far simpler and more affordable.

"There is such a significant overlap between what's normal and abnormal on an ECG [electrocardiogram] that we need additional screening parameters," Dr. Sami Viskin, a cardiologist at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, said yesterday in a university press release. "This test, when done on people with strong symptoms, can really give...doctors a yardstick to compare those at risk for sudden death syndrome to those who would otherwise go on to live a healthy life."

Named after the doctor, the Viskin Test is easy on the patient, who simply undergoes a baseline ECG while resting in the supine position, and is then asked to stand quickly and remain still during continuous ECG recording.… Read more

Hearts heart new mini measuring device

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, along with researchers at the German national metrology institute, say they've successfully tracked a human heartbeat with NIST's mini atom-based magnetic sensor, a development that might one day lead to readings more precise than currently possible using electrocardiograms.

The key advantage to using the magnetic signals of the heartbeat, says principal investigator John Kitching, is that they "are not affected at all while propagating from the source--the heart, say--to outside the body because the body is essentially transparent to magnetic fields." Electrical signals, on the other hand, &… Read more

EPI Life: World's first EKG mobile phone

