Harvard, Russians Plan Study Of Causes of 'Sudden Death'

The School of Public Health and the leading Soviet cardiological institute Saturday announced plans to undertake a joint study of the fatal heart disease known as sudden death.

Dr. Bernard Lown, associate professor of Cardiology in Public Health, will head a Harvard group in collaboration with Dr. Igor Shkhvastsabai of the Myasnikov Institute of Cardiology in Moscow and his staff.

The study aims to employ the large population areas of both Boston and Moscow to validate Lown's hypothesis that sudden death is caused by "electrical accidents."

Sudden Death

"People drop dead because of electrical derangement of the heartbeat," said Lown. Sudden death kills 400,000 Americans yearly. There are no precise warnings to alert the victim of an attack and the time between an attack and death is very short, often a matter of minutes.

The study will compare data obtained from long term electronic monitoring of subjects' heartbeats and from experiments on the effects of exercise on patients.

"Our goal is to identify susceptible subjects," said Lown. His team is also developing drugs which would be used to regulate heartbeat and is studying the higher nervous activities involved with heartbeat rate.

Electronic monitoring and exercise testing has been in use at the School of Public Health and the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital for several years.

Boston Resident Testing

According to Lown, several hundred Boston residents are already being monitored and about 2400 have undergone "stress" testing.

The Myasnikov Institute plans to begin heart monitoring and stress experimenting as soon as equipment and trained Russian workers arrive from Harvard, "probably by late summer or early autumn," said Lown.

The Myasnikov Institute has been doing extensive study in the problem of artereosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) but has done very little on sudden death.

Harvard expressed interest in Lown's work when it discovered that sudden death strikes as frequently in the Soviet Union as in the United States.

Funding for the project remains uncertain. Lown cited cuts in federal training grants as an immediate problem. The grants support working physicians. "I have several working fellows here," said Lown, "and beginning July 1, I will have no stipend for them."

He said, however, that the financial difficulties do not immediately threaten the study because "the Russians are fully funded, and our component is small."