The European Sudden Cardiac Arrest network (Escape-net) is backed by the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) and the European Resuscitation Council, and is being funded by a European Union Horizon 2020 grant.
Sudden cardiac arrest causes around 20 per cent of all deaths in Europe. It is deadly within minutes if left untreated and survival rates are just 5-20 per cent.
“We can only prevent sudden cardiac arrest if we know what causes it,” said Escape-Net project leader Hanno Tan. “Studying cardiac arrest is challenging because it happens suddenly and unexpectedly. Progression is rapid and patients are often dead within ten minutes.”
In Escape-Net, 16 scientific teams across Europe are pooling their expertise and patient populations to create a database of sudden cardiac arrest that is sufficiently large to study causes, treatments, and prevention strategies. The database will include more than 80,000 sudden cardiac arrest patients and over 20,000 DNA samples.
The search for causes of sudden cardiac arrest will include acquired factors, such as lifestyle, comorbidities, medication use, genetic factors, and environmental factors. Three teams in the consortium will analyse genetic factors to discover why some patients with acute myocardial infarction have a cardiac arrest and others do not.
The hunt for treatments will analyse the effectiveness of existing resuscitation strategies and investigate what determines whether or not a patient survives.
Survival from sudden cardiac arrest primarily depends on the speed at which resuscitation is started. The researchers will evaluate whether comorbidities and genetic make-up also have an impact on survival.
“It’s quite conceivable that a diabetic person has a lower survival rate even though he or she has been resuscitated just as fast as a person without diabetes,” said Tan, who is an associate professor at the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. “Similarly, a particular genetic factor may increase or decrease the likelihood of survival.”
Prevention of sudden cardiac arrest is another aim of the project, which will be possible after the researchers identify who is at risk. For example, some medications may put people of a certain age, sex, and with particular comorbidities and genetic profile at risk of cardiac arrest while others are safe.
“Sudden cardiac arrest is one of the top killers in industrialised societies,” Tan said. “There are big gains to be had if we find the combinations of causes that create the highest risk and can then design the best treatments and preventive measures.”
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