BY JASMINE BUDAK
THE POWER OF KNOWING:
How SickKids Is Shining New Light on ARVC
In fall 1990, 20-year-old Heather Cartwright was rowing in the annual regatta at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. She was in the best shape of her life. She’d been training all summer and had her sights on making the national team someday. But in the final thousand meters of the race, Heather’s body started to shut down. She could hardly see. She was dizzy. Her legs went limp. As the boat crossed the finish line, she was slumped over her oar, barely conscious.
(L-R) SIBLINGS BRIAN, MEREDITH AND HEATHER CARTWRIGHT. MEREDITH AND HEATHER WERE BOTH DIAGNOSED WITH ARVC AFTER EXPERIENCING A MAJOR CARDIAC EVENT. BRIAN IS BEING TESTED YEARLY. TOGETHER, THEY SUPPORT ARVC RESEARCH AT TORONTO’S HOSPITAL FOR SICK CHILDREN AND TORONTO GENERAL HOSPITAL.
At the local hospital, Heather was stabilized and told she’d had an exerciseinduced tachycardia, meaning her heart rate had become so fast it couldn’t pump blood to her body. It wasn’t a diagnosis but a symptom of something more serious. At the time, her cardiologist didn’t know exactly what. As a young athlete in her prime, Heather thought her collapse was a fluky symptom of overexertion. “I thought I was healthy, I thought I was fine,” she remembers. “I thought the problem was to be easily explained and easily fixed.”
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But it was neither. It would take four years for Heather to get a diagnosis: arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, or ARVC, a rare, hereditary heart disease that the medical community had only just officially defined. The main feature of ARVC is frequent arrhythmias, spells of erratic or fast heartbeats that, if severe enough, can cause cardiac arrest and sudden death. The symptoms are brought on by intense exercise, so athletes are disproportionately affected. As this story was going to print, Danish soccer player Christian Eriksen was
revived with a defibrillator after collapsing inexplicably during a Euro Cup match, a chilling scene that looks a lot like an arrythmia-induced cardiac arrest. “This disease kills suddenly and unexpectedly,” says Heather. “Seemingly healthy, athletic, happy kids who are just out on a soccer field or in a hockey rink or on a basketball court or on a rowing course.” But this shadow may be lifting. With help from donors like Heather and her family, researchers at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) are casting
