HOW do you tell a healthy heart from one that could stop without warning? By measuring variations in the length of the heartbeat, according to a team of researchers in Greece.
The finding could provide a way to screen for people at risk of sudden cardiac death. Such people’s heartbeat often looks perfectly healthy by conventional criteria. Yet a quarter of a million people die each year in the US alone when their heart suddenly stops and, like the soccer player Marc-Vivien Foé who collapsed and died last year while playing for Cameroon, many of them have had no history…
