Dr. Christian van der Werf, a research fellow at the Department of Cardiogenetics, Academic Medical Centre, Amsterdam, The Netherlands has suggested that if a young person dies suddenly, the relatives should always be referred for cardiological and genetic examination in order to identify if they too are at risk of sudden death. He said this at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics on 26 May, 2009. Although his team's research showed that inherited heart disease was present in over 30% of the families of sudden unexplained death (SUD) victims, the majority of such relatives were currently not being referred for examination.
When an individual aged 1-50 years dies suddenly, autopsy reveals an inheritable heart disease in the majority of the victims. But in approximately 20% autopsy does not reveal the cause of death. "We thought that cardiological and genetic examination of surviving first degree relatives of these SUD patients might reveal an inherited heart disease", said Dr. van der Werf.
In the largest such study to date, the team looked at the outcome of first degree relative screening in 127 families who had suffered an SUD and where either there had been no autopsy (53.8%), or the autopsy did not reveal a cause of death. The average age at death of the SUD victims was only 29.8 years old.