Poor lung function appears to be a stronger marker of risk for sudden cardiac death than for a survivable first coronary event, results of a prospective population-based study suggest.
Dr Suneela Zaigham
Among 28,584 adults with no history of acute coronary events who were followed over four decades, every standard deviation decrease in forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) was associated with a 23% increase in risk for sudden cardiac death, reported Suneela Zaigham, PhD, a cardiovascular epidemiology fellow at the University of Lund, Lund, Sweden, and colleagues.
"Our main findings and subsequent conclusions are that low FEV1 is associated with both sudden cardiac death and nonfatal coronary events but is consistently more strongly associated with future sudden cardiac death," Zaigham said in a narrated poster presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) 2021 International Congress, which was held online.
"We propose that measurement with spirometry in early life could aid in the risk stratification of future sudden cardiac death, and our results support the use of spirometry for cardiovascular risk assessment," she said.
Marc Humbert, MD, PhD, professor of respiratory medicine at the Université Paris-Saclay, Paris, France, who was not involved in the study, commented that "this is something we can measure fairly easily, meaning that lung function could be used as part of a screening tool.
