Research Highlights 2013 Professor Sanjay Sharma, CRY’s consultant cardiologist CRY’s research programme is overseen by Professor Sanjay Sharma. Sanjay is Professor of Inherited Cardiovascular Disease and Sports Cardiology at St George’s Hospital, London; Virgin Money London Marathon Medical Director; and was the London 2012 Olympic Cardiologist. CRY’s Research Fellowship Programme funds doctors for 2 years who choose to specialise in the field of inherited cardiac diseases, sudden cardiac death, screening and sports cardiology. There are currently 6 CRY Research Fellows at St George’s Hospital who spend 50% of their time in NHS clinics and their remaining time is divided between screening and research. As well as the fellows CRY are currently funding, 13 more fellows have been trained by CRY and are now working in the NHS throughout the UK. During 2013, CRY Research Fellows published more than 17 papers in leading cardiology journals. One issue faced by cardiologists is the overlap between what normally happens to the heart with exercise versus a diseased heart muscle. In addition to this, one of the big issues about screening, certainly what the antagonists argue, is that screening with ECG is associated with a lot of false positive results which can cause unnecessary anxiety. Inside this issue Several papers this year have addressed these issues and provided data that should lead to more stringent testing p2 Research Awards criteria; reducing false positive results, allowing for more p3 CRY International Conference accurate diagnostic protocols and informing guidelines. p4 British Cardiovascular Society
Conference CRY’s Research Programme p5 Interviews p6 Research CRY’s research programme is focused on screening in the p8 CRY’s Research History
general population, elite athletes and cardiac pathology. It is our unique expertise in sports cardiology and how athleticism, ethnicity and gender affect the ECG that enables us to conduct screening on a general population level. To test young people you need to understand the results of ALL young people. It is CRY’s expertise in sports cardiology that gives us the authority to take forward screening in the UK. Thousands of young people aged 14-35 years have been evaluated, resulting in many ‘firsts’ in the scientific literature. CRY were first to: • provide information on the physiological upper limits of cardiac dimensions in adult British national level athletes (published in European Journal of Applied Physiology) • characterise cardiac dimensions in a large cohort of adolescent athletes, who are most vulnerable to sudden death during sport from cardiomyopathy (landmark studies in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and Heart are the main international studies on this subject) • state the prevalence and significance of an isolated long QT interval in elite athletes. This study has called for the revision of consensus guidelines published by the American College of Cardiology • describe the prevalence of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) in elite athletes • CRY Research Fellows wrote the first paper on ECG changes in adolescent athletes when 1,000 athletes were studied (published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine and is a blueprint for the European Society of Sports Cardiology) • CRY performed the only study on cardiovascular adaptation in athletes of West African origin. Results show that ECGs in black athletes are quite different to those in white athletes and could be mistaken for serious cardiac disorders. CRY’s future aims include the identification - and determining the precise prevalence - of cardiac disorders capable of causing sudden death in asymptomatic and apparently healthy individuals; and accurately assessing cost implications if such a programme were implemented nationally.
Cardiac Risk in the Young
Research Highlights 2013
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