In Britain, 12 young people die every week from heart conditions they had no idea about. The charity Cardiac Risk in the Young, is aiming to bring that number down and recently toured the country to give people a chance to get their heart checked out. Thousands signed up to be screened, and Crawley News Sports reporter SAM MUNNERY was one of them.
I felt a certain degree of anxiety when rolling into the Philips UK headquarters in Guildford, about to have my heart checked out.
As someone who tries to keep reasonably active, I was always confident that the organ pumping blood around my body was in good nick – but you just never know for sure.
The doubt comes from the stories I’ve read – from international footballers like Mark Vivien Foe (Cameroon) to local sportsmen like cyclist John Ibbotson and Brockham footballer Stuart Attridge. Crawley Town fans may also remember Clement Pinault, the brother of Reds midfielder Thomas, who died of a heart attack while playing for French side Clermont Ferrand.
All apparently in the peak of condition, all suffering a sudden, tragic death.
The specific reasons for the deaths of these athletes were different abut are covered under the umbrella term Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome (SADS). It doesn’t care whether you play professional sport or not.
I’d want to know if there was a problem, but a small part of me doesn’t. I wouldn’t want to be told I couldn’t run, swim or cycle anymore, but then again I’d rather that than die.
So there I was, walking up the steps into a former Philips trailer in the company’s car park, ready to find out how my ticker was ticking. The trailer used to be a mobile training centre for Philips staff, but the electrical giant donated it to the Tadworth-based charity Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY) which has converted it into a mobile heart screening centre.
The link to Philips is a natural one, as the company makes a lot of the testing equipment used by CRY, and has helped to fund the charity’s tour of England this summer. The CRY ‘Test My Heart Tour 09’ offered free heart testing to young people aged 14 to 35, a valuable opportunity to uncover any nasty surprises.
The screening unit completed its tour with a stop at several Philips sites in the UK, including Chichester, Chelmsford (Suffolk), Hamilton (Scotland) and here in Guildford, to allow Philips staff to benefit from their employer’s generosity.
And it was clear many of them had taken up the offer. Around 180 employees and employee relatives had registered for a free screening at Guildford and the waiting area was always full.
After filling out a disclaimer form – you have to accept that being tested could result in you having to stop strenuous exercise, if your heart has a defect – I was weighed, measured and put back in my seat to wait for the first test.
Most of the people coming in were in their 20’s, all looked quite healthy and none seemed nervous. Neither was I now, for that matter.
After a short 15-minute wait, my name was called and I went in to a small room containing a bed, a complicated looking machine and a cardiac physiologist called Teresa Brennan, from St George’s Hospital in Tooting.
She was carrying out the electrocardiogram (ECG) test that everyone who is screened would have. It measures the pathways of electrical conduction around the heart, checking there are no interruptions or irregularities.
As she told me to lay on the bed and attached a series of silver stickers to my body, I notice the amiable Teresa was an expert at the ‘distraction chat’ that we have all experienced when you have an injection as a child. I pointed this out to her.
“You have to use your people skills. I love people and find it easy to make them feel relaxed,” she replied, attaching wires to the silver stickers.
“When people come into the room they are quite concerned and you pick up on it. So the first thing I do is to put their mind at rest.
“It’s vital to do that as you get a clearer reading. There are so many artefacts that can interfere with it. You pick up noise from the body – tension shows as noise.”
Luckily Teresa did such a good job that I was ultra-relaxed and gave a nice, clear reading. It took just 20 seconds and I didn’t feel a thing.
Then it was off the room next door where cardiologist Dr Navin Chandra was waiting with my results. We discussed the printout of my heart’s electrical activity, and fortunately all appeared to be normal. If it wasn’t, Dr Chandra would have recommended an ultrasound scan, which gives more of a detailed assessment of the heart by looking at its structure.
For the purposes of this article however, I was given one anyway. The ultrasound is the same as that carried out on pregnant women, and it’s a real eye opener.
For the first time, I could see and hear my heart beating on a screen as cardiac physiologist Neville Croft, of Leeds Nufffield Hospital, moved the sensor across a layer of gel on my chest.
Primarily he looks for signs of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which to everyone else is an abnormal thickening of the heart muscle. No such issues were flagged up, as the ECG had indicated, but it was reassuring to have all the same.
CRY has scheduled screenings in Belfast in September, and in Colchester and the Isle of Man at the end of October. With some, a cost is involved – the ECG at Colchester is £35 – but for others that have received funding, people can sign up and be screened free of charge.
Nothing local to Surrey is currently on the list at http://www.c-r-y.org.uk, but if you are aged 14-35, regardless of whether you play sport, undergoing a heart screening which is so quick and painless is a far better option that finding out the hard way.
Cox’s mission is not over
The nationwide tour undertaken by Cardiac Risk in the Young has been hailed as a success by the charity’s chief executive.
But Alison Cox MBE believes CRY still has a ‘long way’ to go in raising awareness of Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome in Britain.
Figures from the Office of National Statistics show that on average, 12 people aged 35 and under die every week in Britain from a previously unknown heart condition.
Mrs Cox is keen to see that figure drop and was pleased with the results from CRY’s Test My Heart Tour, which screened more than 2,500 hearts and enabled those with problems to take more tests and access further treatment if necessary.
She said: “We found two people with Brugada Syndrome in just over 2,000 people. That’s great because it only affects one in 10,000 people.
“The only chance of finding it is through pro-active screening so that’s why we believe in our screening programme.”
Mrs Cox founded CRY after her son Steven, now 33, was diagnosed with a heart abnormality at the age of 18 while studying in America on a tennis scholarship.
As a tennis player herself, Mrs Cox admits she had heard of other players dying for apparently no reason, and when her son was told of his condition, the penny dropped.
“When I was on the circuit, two people died from Sudden Death Syndrome and these were top tennis players,” she said.
“So when Steve was diagnosed I thought, I know other people this has happened to in their 20s so how can you say nothing can be done about it?
“That’s when I started CRY. I worried how many other people were out there with the same problem”
Her son’s condition is a personal reminder of the grief she would have suffered had he not been diagnosed, the grief experienced by many other families who do not uncover a relative’s problem in time.
Mrs Cox’s experiences sustain her drive to grow CRY and develop new initiatives to get more people to attend screenings and find out if they do have an underlying heart condition.
The screenings also feature ultrasound scans to give more detailed assessments of the heart and, if it is required, the charity will connect people with clinics and experts who can arrange further treatment, including operations to cure the problem.
The success of the screenings and their rising popularity is vindication of Mrs Cox’s determination to found her charity in 1995, despite a dismissive response from parts of the cardiology profession.
She said: “CRY is the only organisation doing anything about this. When I started it, I was told I was wasting my time. A awful lot of consultants said I shouldn’t do it. But we have come from one death a week to 12 deaths a week.
“Now there is a lot of interest from the medical profession which is key. The next stage is to empower GPs as much as we can. Only 20 per cent of people with Sudden Death Syndrome have symptoms and on 11 per cent would survive an attack. For many, the first symptom is when they are dead.”
Celebrities such as Sir Steve Redgrave, David Walliams, James Cracknell and Sir Clive Woodward have all added their patronage to the charity, while health secretary Andy Burnham is a keen supporter of CRY’s screening programme.
Their backing is vital as CRY aims to raise its profile but for Mrs Cox there is still much more work to do.
She said: “My goal is that young people say to each other: ‘You mean you haven’t been screened?”
“And the other is to offer the service for free so many people have that opportunity.”
Fact File
Experts estimate that at least 12 young people died suddenly each week in the UK of cardiac abnormalities.
The majority of sudden heart-related deaths in young people are due to inherited forms of heart muscle disorder and irregular heart beat.
The most common cause of sudden death in young people is Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM) – an excessive thickening of the heart muscle.
Sudden death in older people is usually due to blocked arteries in the heart, whereas sudden death in young people (35 years of age or less) is usually from inherited heart conditions that run in families.
