I came across this article in the "I" newspaper yesterday.
inews.co.uk/essentials/news...
Beating her heart condition at its own game? Elaine Chew, an accomplished pianist and music professor at Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL), has experienced irregular heartbeats, or arrhythmia, since childhood. This time last year she was so ill she couldn’t walk down the street without stopping to rest. Now, she has developed a novel approach that could help patients with heart conditions like hers. What does it involve? Translating electrocardiogram (ECG) data from patients into a sheet of music. Intriguing – but is she well enough to work? The academic, who was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, the most common form of arrhythmia, which raises the risk of stroke five-fold, underwent a successful operation last November and is in good health now. It was while she was in hospital recovering that she came up with a way to help treat patients. What happened? Professor Chew was chatting with a medic when the doctor mentioned in passing a Christmas quiz question he’d come up with to test his colleagues’ know-how. The cardiology expert, Dr Jem Lane, researched music with rhythms similar to different types of arrhythmia and challenged his colleagues to guess the heart rhythms the pieces most resembled. And that sparked an idea? Yes. Professor Chew realised that it could be possible to harness music to offer better treatments to patients with irregular heartbeats. Currently, heart rhythms are recorded with an ECG. Cardiologists study the data closely – with their eyes – to diagnose a patient and suggest treatment. What did Professor Chew suggest? That the data could be treated as a digital record of the “symphony” performed by the heart. She enlisted a team of researchers to translate ECG data into music which can be performed by any player and listenrd to by anybody. How does that help? “Translated into music, everyone can have a better idea of what arrhythmia feels like for a patient.” the academic told an audience at the British Science Festival in Brighton. More importantly, this approach could reveal hidden patterns in ECG data, which can be used to divide patients into finer categories so that they can receive more personalised treatment in the future. Is her theory being put into practice? Professor Chew’s consultant cardiologist, Dr Pier Lambiase now collaborates with his former patient on her research. “At the moment, nearly 40 per cent of patients do not respond to the standard treatment that we offer,” he said. “We need to develop new approaches, like the one Elaine is pursuing, to improve our categorisation of the patients and offer more individually tailored treatment to give better care.”
Read more at: inews.co.uk/essentials/news...
Anne
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