A controlling cause of potentially fatal cardiac arrest has been identified

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Scientists from the Oxford Biomedical Research Center conducted a study that allowed them to identify the control cause of potentially fatal cardiac arrest. It is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. As it turned out, the danger lies in the abnormal arrangement of muscle fibers.

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is the leading cause of sudden death in young people, but the microscopic abnormalities of the heart muscle that are behind these events are only detected after the tragedy. When viewed under a microscope, the muscle fibers of deceased patients were found to be arranged abnormally and not in their usual alignment. This provides an ideal focus for potentially fatal heart rhythms. Detecting this early would allow doctors to intervene in sudden cardiac arrest by installing a cardioverter-defibrillator – a small device that corrects the situation. At the same time, experts note that heart muscle fibers cannot be taken from living people, and the disorder can only be seen in post-mortem samples. The team used a non-invasive method that allows them to track the distribution of water molecules inside the heart. Using their new scanning technique, the researchers were able to see similar patterns of heart muscle disorder in living patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that had been found in previous post-mortem studies. In future experiments, the scientists hope to make the scanning faster.

“We hope that our discovery will improve the way we identify people at high risk for receiving an implanted device to prevent sudden death,” the scientists said.