Arrhythmias & Cardiomyopathy

Cardiac electrophysiology at St George’s has a long-standing reputation for excellence and has involved translational research that goes beyond the boundaries of arrhythmia alone. Our main strengths lie in the study of atrial fibrillation, ventricular tachycardia and sudden cardiac death, inherited heart disease, heart failure and sports cardiology.

One aspect is the detailed investigation of patients and their families with inherited heart disease and sudden deaths and their characterisation utilising novel electrocardiographic and imaging approaches combined with genetic studies. This has led to novel genetic modifier and functional expression studies. The same approaches are being used in the study of drug-induced sudden death risk.

Other aspects include general population studies of the clinical, imaging and electrocardiographic characteristics of young people, ethnic minorities and athletes in relation to their risk of sudden death. This extends to large scale studies of the epidemiology of sudden death in these groups, particularly in relation to ECG traits and genetic factors.

Atrial fibrillation has been the subject of electrocardiographic, imaging and proteomic studies at St George’s as well as clinical trials of the therapeutic interventions with antiarrhythmics and ablation. Two large scale projects are progressing with industry and European funding. In addition clinical research into ventricular arrhythmias and risk profiling in acquired heart disease has focused on novel technologies to support ablation techniques and novel ECG markers for sudden death risk.

There is a clear overlap with heart failure and muscle disease and the role for novel markers for the response to resynchronisation therapy and specific disease areas such as amyloidosis are other specialised areas in our research.