Sudden cardiac death (SCD) is estimated to occur at an incidence of between 50 to 100 per 100,000 individuals in North America and Europe each year, claiming between 250,000 and 450,000 lives in the United States annually. In younger individuals (15-35 years of age), the incidence of SCD is between 1 to 2 per 100,000 young individuals. Sudden cardiac death, particularly in young individuals, may suggest an inherited form of heart disease. In some cases of sudden cardiac death, autopsy may identify a structural abnormality, such as a form of cardiomyopathy. Postmortem diagnosis of a hereditary cardiomyopathy may assist in confirmation of the cause and manner of death, as well as risk assessment in living family members.
Cardiomyopathies are a group of disorders characterized by disease of the heart muscle. Cardiomyopathy can be caused by either inherited, genetic factors or nongenetic (acquired) causes, such as infection or trauma. When the presence or severity of the cardiomyopathy observed in a patient cannot be explained by acquired causes, genetic testing for the inherited forms of cardiomyopathy may be considered. Overall, cardiomyopathies are some of the most common genetic disorders. The inherited forms of cardiomyopathy include hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC or AC), and left ventricular noncompaction (LVNC).
During autopsy at Pathserve we collect a sample of cardiac muscle, which we submit to a genetic lab for Next-generation sequencing (NGS) to test for the presence of variants in coding regions and intron/exon boundaries of the genes analyzed, as well as some other regions that have known disease-causing variants.