5 Clinical Trials for Various Conditions
The study aims to use flecainide infusion test as diagnostic test to unmask concealed Brugada Syndrome cases. It proposes to assess the safety profile of this test in US patients and its higher sensitivity when compared to procainamide infusion (the conventional drug used in the USA). As a substudy it proposes to apply this test to early ARVC cases in order to evaluate if ECG changes similar to those seen in Brugada Syndrome could be unmasked by flecainide iv.
The purpose of this study is to determine if quinidine therapy (not guided by the results of electrophysiologic studies) will reduce the long-term risk of arrhythmic events in asymptomatic Brugada Syndrome.
Each year world-wide, 2.5 million fetuses die unexpectedly in the last half of pregnancy, 25,000 in the United States, making fetal demise ten-times more common than Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. This study will apply a novel type of non-invasive monitoring, called fetal magnetocardiography (fMCG) used thus far to successfully evaluate fetal arrhythmias, in order to discover potential hidden electrophysiologic abnormalities that could lead to fetal demise in five high-risk pregnancy conditions associated with fetal demise.
Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) have driven a paradigm shift in the modeling of human disease; the ability to reprogram patient-specific cells holds the promise of an enhanced understanding of disease mechanisms and phenotypic variability, with applications in personalized predictive pharmacology/toxicology, cell therapy and regenerative medicine. This research will collect blood or skin biopsies from patients and healthy controls for the purpose of generating cell and tissue models of Mendelian heritable forms of heart disease focusing on cardiomyopathies, channelopathies and neuromuscular diseases. Cardiomyocytes derived from hiPSCs will provide a ready source of disease specific cells to study pathogenesis and therapeutics.
Epilepsy is a common condition which affects over 3 million people in the US. Patients with uncontrolled epilepsy have a lifetime risk of sudden unexpected death (SUDEP) of 35%, which is greatest in those under 40 years of age. The exact mechanisms and causes are not understood but can be due to underlying conditions which affect the heart and brain, which may lead to dangerous heart rhythms and death. Some of these conditions which affect heart and brain have an identifiable genetic cause. This study aims to identify known genetic causes of heart rhythm and sudden death related disorders in patients with epilepsy.