ADECA Blog Series

Health screening is an established component of high-quality medical care and doctors regularly screen their patients for disease risk markers such as high cholesterol or hypertension. Yet, little progress has been made in finding ways to prevent one major problem, sudden cardiac death (SCD) which, according to the American Heart Association (AHA), is responsible for approximately 370,000 deaths annually in the US.

Prolongation of the QT interval is a well-established risk factor that predicts increased mortality from sudden cardiac death.1 Identification of patients with the highest risk of QT prolongation and associated adverse outcomes has been facilitated by the use of QT risk scores that have greater predictive accuracy than the QT interval alone.