Children should be screened to prevent early heart attacks

Inherited heart disease can be successfully detected within families by screening one-to-two year old children at the time of their routine vaccinations, according to a clinical study led by researchers at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) that involved over 10,000 children. The researchers from QMUL's Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine estimate that, with effective treatment, the screening strategy could prevent about 600 heart attacks in people under the age of 40, each year in England and Wales, if the programme was rolled out by public health agencies. Familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH) is a genetic disorder characterised by high cholesterol levels and is the main inherited cause of early heart disease. Without preventive medication young FH adults have about a 10-fold increased risk of a heart attack before the age of 40. In the largest study to date of cholesterol and FH mutations in children, the prevalence of FH mutations in children was found to be about one in 270, nearly double that previously reported (one in 500). Because of the inherited nature of the disorder every child identified with the disorder will have one parent also affected. This offers the opportunity of screening two generations at the same time - so-called child-parent screening.