Boys, Girls and Heart Problems

According a new study, adolescent boys suffering from Long-QT syndrome (LQTS) – a type of heart condition – face four times the risk of a heart attack and sudden cardiac death than girls of the same age.

A team of researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center carried out the study by tracking the health of nearly 2,800 adolescents reported with LQTS. Long-QT syndrome is an abnormality of the heart’s electrical rhythm. The researchers tracked the health of the adolescents to understand the effects of this syndrome on them.

Reported in the September 13 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the study found 81 of the adolescents suffered an “aborted cardiac arrest” in which they had an abrupt loss of heart function. An aborted cardiac arrest does not result in death because it is reversed on time – either through medication or with defibrillation.

45 other adolescents were not so lucky and fell prey to sudden cardiac death. The researchers discovered there were three factors associated with cardiac arrest as well as sudden cardiac death. These are recent loss of consciousness, the duration of the QTc interval (which is an electrocardiogram measurement), and gender.

Boys in the 10 to 12 year age range were found to be at four times the risk of having cardiac arrest or sudden cardiac death as compared to girls in the same age range. However gender had no effect on the risk in adolescents in the 13 to 20 year age range.

“Adolescents who had lost consciousness once during the last two years were nearly 12 times more likely than those who had not done so for the past 10 years to have a life-threatening event,” the researchers said. This risk increased 18-fold if consciousness was lost two or more times in the last two years as compared to those who did not lose consciousness.

The risk of life threatening events was reduced by 64% in adolescents who had lost consciousness during the last two years but were receiving beta-blocker therapy. According to the authors of the study, identification of these risk factors “might serve as a useful guide for prophylactic treatment decisions to reduce the risk of sudden death in patients with LQTS during the high-risk teenage years.”

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