Insights into sudden cardiac death: exploring the potential relevance of non-diagnostic autopsy findings.

Aims: Unexplained sudden cardiac death (SCD) may be attributable to cardiogenetic disease. Presence or absence of autopsy anomalies detected following premature sudden death direct appropriate clinical evaluation of at-risk relatives towards inherited cardiomyopathies or primary arrhythmia syndromes, respectively. We investigated the relevance of non-diagnostic pathological abnormalities of indeterminate causality (uncertain) such as myocardial hypertrophy, fibrosis, or inflammatory infiltrates to SCD.

The Cardiac Genetics Clinic: a model for multidisciplinary genomic medicine.

Objectives: To describe patient characteristics, standard operating procedure, and uptake of genetic testing at the multidisciplinary Cardiac Genetics Clinic (CGC) at the Royal Melbourne Hospital during its first 6 years.

Design: Database exploration of referral diagnoses, sex, number of clinic visits and incidence of genetic testing in a population of individuals attending the CGC.

Setting: Tertiary referral hospital (Royal Melbourne Hospital) providing cardiac genetics services to the state of Victoria.