Hello I’m Becks Breslin, co-founder of BeatSCAD and chair of the board of trustees.
When I had a SCAD back in 2012, one of the cardiologists treating me at Glenfield was Dr David Adlam. Now, I was fortunate in that he was able to answer some of my questions about SCAD, and theorise about some of the others, as he had seen a few SCAD cases before.
Once I was home I did some research to find some more information, and I found that Dr Adlam had written a paper about SCAD, and also that there was a research project that had fairly recently started over in the USA. So when I saw Dr Adlam for my 1 year follow up, I asked him why there was no UK research. He told me there weren’t enough patients to study, but at that point I’d been meeting other patients online so I told him that I knew about 35 others in the UK.
Little did I know that that discussion that day would lead to a research project that has discovered so much about SCAD already.
So the initial funding was to study 100 patients, and that seemed pretty ambitious, but the number was achieved and exceeded with hard work from the research team and the patient group. The 100 patients, they were studied in detail, valuable data was generated and that contributed to knowledge that gained and shared in the first European Position Paper on SCAD that was published in 2018.
So since then the research process has changed quite a bit. Hundreds of patients have continued to register with the Leicester team but it just isn’t feasible to study everyone as in-depth and detailed as was done with the first 100. So it’s really important for the researchers to identify areas to focus on. So Dr Adlam’s most recent research fellow, Dr Alice Wood, she has studied smaller sub-groups of men, looked at recurrent SCAD patients and then looked at age and gender matched healthy volunteers as well. These acted as control for comparison. Dr Wood’s still working on the analysis and writing that up so we’re looking forward to hearing about that in the future.