Publications by authors named "Fu Ng"

Importance: Hypertension underpins significant global morbidity and mortality. Early lifestyle intervention and treatment are effective in reducing adverse outcomes. Artificial intelligence-enhanced electrocardiography (AI-ECG) has been shown to identify a broad spectrum of subclinical disease and may be useful for predicting incident hypertension.

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Background: Myocardial infarction (MI) is a complex disease caused by both lifestyle and genetic factors. This study aims to investigate the predictive value of genetic risk, in addition to traditional cardiovascular risk factors, for recurrent events following early-onset MI.

Methods: The Italian Genetic Study of Early-Onset Myocardial Infarction is a cohort study enrolling patients with MI before 45 years.

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Article Synopsis
  • Cardiac trabeculae are muscular structures in the heart that have a crucial but not fully understood role in heart function and disease.
  • A study involving over 47,000 participants from the UK Biobank found links between trabecular shape and rare genetic variants in 56 genes related to heart muscle function and development.
  • The research also revealed 68 genetic regions associated with heart condition pathways, indicating that variations in trabeculation may influence the severity of heart diseases like hypertrophic and dilated cardiomyopathy.
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  • The study explores the use of advanced neural network-derived ECG features to predict cardiovascular disease and mortality, aiming to uncover subtle, important indicators that traditional methods might miss.
  • Using data from over 1.8 million patients and various international cohorts, researchers identified three distinct phenogroups, with one, phenogroup B, showing a significantly higher mortality risk—20% more than phenogroup A.
  • The findings suggest that neural network ECG features not only indicate future health risks like atrial fibrillation and ischemic heart disease but also highlight specific genetic loci that may contribute to these risks.
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Article Synopsis
  • - The AI-ECG risk estimator (AIRE) platform was developed to improve predictions of future disease and mortality risks from electrocardiograms (ECGs), addressing limitations in existing models related to individual actionability and biological plausibility.
  • - AIRE utilizes deep learning and survival analysis on a massive dataset of over 1.16 million ECGs to predict patient-specific mortality risks and timelines, validated across diverse international cohorts.
  • - The platform demonstrated high accuracy for predicting various health risks, such as all-cause mortality and heart failure, and identified biological pathways linked to cardiac health, making it a promising tool for clinical use globally.
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Rationale: While sex differences in right heart phenotypes have been observed, the molecular drivers remain unknown.

Objectives: To provide biological insights into sex differences in the structure and function of the right ventricle (RV) using common genetic variation.

Methods: RV phenotypes were obtained from cardiac magnetic resonance imaging in 18,156 women and 16,171 men from the UK Biobank.

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Patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) are at risk for lethal ventricular arrhythmia, but the electrophysiological substrate behind this is not well-understood. We used non-invasive electrocardiographic imaging to characterize patients with HCM, including cardiac arrest survivors. HCM patients surviving ventricular fibrillation or hemodynamically unstable ventricular tachycardia (n = 17) were compared to HCM patients without a personal history of potentially lethal arrhythmia (n = 20) and a pooled control group with structurally normal hearts.

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Background: Preeclampsia is a leading cause of maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality. However, the current understanding of its underlying biological pathways remains limited.

Methods: In this study, we performed a cross-platform proteome- and transcriptome-wide genetic analysis aimed at evaluating the causal relevance of >2000 circulating proteins with preeclampsia, supported by data on the expression of over 15 000 genes across 36 tissues leveraging large-scale preeclampsia genetic association data from women of European ancestry.

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Article Synopsis
  • Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs), specifically semaglutide, show cardiovascular benefits and may reduce the incidence of atrial fibrillation (AF) in high-risk patients.
  • A meta-analysis of 10 randomized clinical trials involving 12,651 patients revealed a 42% reduction in the risk of AF with semaglutide compared to placebo during an average follow-up of 68 months.
  • The study found no significant differences in AF risk reduction based on the route of administration (oral or subcutaneous), as well as no influence from baseline characteristics like diabetes status or BMI.
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Aims: Although electrical activity of the normal human heart is well characterized by the electrocardiogram, detailed insights into within-subject and between-subject variations of ventricular activation and recovery by noninvasive electroanatomic mapping are lacking. We characterized human epicardial activation and recovery within and between normal subjects using non-invasive electrocardiographic imaging (ECGI) as a basis to better understand pathology.

Methods And Results: Epicardial activation and recovery were assessed by ECGI in 22 normal subjects, 4 subjects with bundle branch block (BBB) and 4 with long-QT syndrome (LQTS).

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The electrocardiogram (ECG) can capture obesity-related cardiac changes. Artificial intelligence-enhanced ECG (AI-ECG) can identify subclinical disease. We trained an AI-ECG model to predict body mass index (BMI) from the ECG alone.

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Background: Recurrent ventricular tachycardia (VT) can be treated by substrate modification of the myocardial scar by catheter ablation during sinus rhythm without VT induction. Better defining this arrhythmic substrate could help improve outcome and reduce ablation burden.

Objective: The study aimed to limit ablation within postinfarction scar to conduction channels within the scar to reduce VT recurrence.

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Article Synopsis
  • * The research involved 16 obese patients and measured changes in heart structure and function before and after surgery, compared to a control group of lean individuals.
  • * Results showed that bariatric surgery led to significant improvements in heart structure and function, but some issues, like prolonged atrial activation, persisted despite weight loss.
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Background: Myocardial electrical heterogeneity is critical for normal cardiac electromechanical function, but abnormal or excessive electrical heterogeneity is proarrhythmic. The spatial ventricular gradient (SVG), a vectorcardiographic measure of electrical heterogeneity, has been associated with arrhythmic events during long-term follow-up, but its relationship with short-term inducibility of ventricular arrhythmias (VAs) is unclear.

Objective: This study was designed to determine associations between SVG and inducible VAs during electrophysiology study.

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Background: Ventricular tachycardia (VT) reduces cardiac output through high heart rates, loss of atrioventricular synchrony, and loss of ventricular synchrony. We studied the contribution of each mechanism and explored the potential therapeutic utility of His bundle pacing to improve cardiac output during VT.

Methods: Study 1 aimed to improve the understanding of mechanisms of harm during VT (using pacing simulated VT).

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Population aging is one of the most important demographic transformations of our time. Increasing the "health span"-the proportion of life spent in good health-is a global priority. Biological aging comprises molecular and cellular modifications over many years, which culminate in gradual physiological decline across multiple organ systems and predispose to age-related illnesses.

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Aims: Current guidelines advise against the use of lipid-lowering drugs during pregnancy. This is based only on previous observational evidence demonstrating an association between statin use and congenital malformations, which is increasingly controversial. In the absence of clinical trial data, we aimed to use drug-target Mendelian randomization to model the potential impact of fetal LDL-lowering, overall and through PCSK9 drug targets, on congenital malformations.

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Background: Three-dimensional (3D) mapping of the ventricular conduction system is challenging.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to use ripple mapping to distinguish conduction system activation to that of adjacent myocardium in order to characterize the conduction system in the postinfarct left ventricle (LV).

Methods: High-density mapping (PentaRay, CARTO) was performed during normal rhythm in patients undergoing ventricular tachycardia ablation.

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Aims: Implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) therapies have been associated with increased mortality and should be minimized when safe to do so. We hypothesized that machine learning-derived ventricular tachycardia (VT) cycle length (CL) variability metrics could be used to discriminate between sustained and spontaneously terminating VT.

Methods And Results: In this single-centre retrospective study, we analysed data from 69 VT episodes stored on ICDs from 27 patients (36 spontaneously terminating VT, 33 sustained VT).

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Introduction: There is interest in partial exchange for infected total hip arthroplasty, as an alternative to complete removal of components in a traditional two-stage revision. Partial exchange avoids the difficulty of removing a well-fixed component and its associated bone loss.

Case Report: We report a case of a 61-year-old male patient with an infected total hip arthroplasty, who underwent a two-stage partial exchange, with retention of the well-fixed femoral stem, and an interim cemented liner.

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