UDLCO: Journal club on Telomere length and sudden cardiac death and role of health tech

Journal club Conversational Transcripts:

[21/09, 08:29] +91 HGN: Why so many Youths are dying due to Massive Heart Attack....., even though they are very healthy, no BP, Diabetes or Heart Problem. Pls do watch this video, definitely it's an eye opener; not only to our today's young generation also to us too.

[21/09, 08:48] +91 SK: Dr Mohit Gupta is a cardiologist at GB Pant hospital Delhi

[21/09, 08:48] +91ST: That's Mohit ucms 92 batch , MBbs, always been a topper in class and several gold medals. He actually had very few friends and good relationships in college .  Well he is bang on point on relationships and longevity but telomere theory trying to explain is looks like a bit of stretch. Hr is fiercely competitive but some where down the line he is inclined into spirituality. But his talk resonates with most longevity studies across the globe.

[21/09, 08:55] +91 ST: https://youtu.be/JefqpUp2nmI?si=UZuYzcCLxwWbfqa6 sudden deaths are related to brugada syndrome other channelopathies of heart .  Luckily it can be picked up with simple ECG in asymptomatic individuals

[21/09, 09:13] +91 SK: He’s actually published a study linking short telomere length to young people with MI on 77 patients

[21/09, 09:27] +91 ST: There is conflicting data in telomere studies and meta analysis haven't helped either. Longer telomere in adults is associated with high mortality where as in younger individuals as per his study shorter telomere is responsible for cardiac arrest. Also in psychiatry ,teenage adolescent depression anxiety disorders all cause shorter telomere. So many confounders there. Seems difficult to understand if we reach certain length of telomere we would suddenly die. At most it can induce cancers or cell replication problems. Some one has to find the truth on these sudden cardiac deaths in young. I heard a stanford talk how Ai is being leveraged to find out sudden cardiac deaths . That was eye opening

[21/09, 09:33] RB : Correlation is not causation

Getting to establish causality is a wicked problem in most human correlation endeavours

[21/09, 09:35] Cyber War Winner RJ: Sounds like his study has confirmation bias ?

[21/09, 09:40] RB: Did it have a control group? Please share the link to the full text if possible

[21/09, 09:57] JR: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmohitgupta/ My School classmate

Should we add him to the discussion? 😊

[21/09, 10:03] S: Hope he is interested in HealthTech as thats the primary scope of this group

[21/09, 10:03] +91 ST: So far the research has shown that there are multiple factors involved in sudden cardiac death in adults. In any case a brief study of 77 patients is not enough to determine a relationship between short telomeres, stress and sudden cardiac death.

[21/09, 10:05] +91 SK: It had a control group 

https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.ihj.2020.11.006

[21/09, 10:06] JR: But we are talking about his work? 😉 That's why I am saying

[21/09, 10:08] S: Yeah. Its an admin judgement call . HealthTech groups have this challenge. Should we get the pure health domain person or purely tech person or someone who has interest in both. Maybe they can join temporarily while the specific topic is being discussed and after that its upto them.

[21/09, 10:32] +91 ST: https://youtu.be/T-4pgL1rNAo?si=XphWWD1mqpe-B7YJ here's the talk , sorry it was UCSF grand rounds . How AI and big data is getting used . The author has given his data repository for further research. U can skip first 6 mins

[21/09, 12:04] RB: Thanks for sharing this.

@⁨S my apologies for discussing what may appear to be pure health although really deep down it's possible that all aspects of healthcare are governed or driven by tech in some way or the other and if you look at Mohit's paper here, he too has used tech to determine telomere length by quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) method utilizing a validated protocol! 

Although in his source of funding statement he has said "none" which makes one wonder how were these 154 samples run on that high tech machine for free! 

Someone must have paid for it! Looking at the fact that it's a government hospital one should have mentioned the source of funding as Indian tax payers money?

Now a small hopefully constructive comment on the study data:

There's an important omission of a very common clinical attribute that can go a long way to diagnose risk prone individuals and that is the clinical phenotype which the study authors have tried to replace with an objective BMI but nothing would beat the phenotype image of a person with sarcopenia and visceral fat that can be made out better clinically (albeit subjective).

Here's where I may begin a rant on how we are corporatising health care through over-testing (the study authors mention that they want the telomere length to become a scalable diagnostic test) and how that's leading to overtreatment. Many kinds of pills will be marketed to you once you know that your telomere length is short and while some would claim to lengthen it, majority of the pills would be to beat the anxiety of living with a longer telomere! However I have decided the above kind of rant is too cliched and I shall not push it here.

[21/09, 12:07] Group Moderator: my pers opinion (and I'm very often wrong) is that strict stereotyping someone into say healthcare or tech etc does not make sense. Everyone in healthcare uses some tech or the other, even invisibly, and also those that are not tech oriented or interested, could be triggers for the biggest tech innovation since they know their problem the best. The biggest challenge is figuring out what problem to solve, not just how to solve it. The Why and What. The How is then a natural outcome. This is the essence of this community. To bring both worlds together slowly but surely and responsibly! So pl do bring on board anyone who empathizes with healthcare. We the community will help convert them to healthtech too, and with their help, the right healthtech! Cheers,

[21/09, 12:08] Group Moderator: I disagree that the focus of this community is ONLY healthtech.

[21/09, 12:10] Group Moderator: Also, not everyone here has to be "sold" on say AI and for that matter any tech. We are a diverse community. We respect everyone's opinions (as long as they are stated professionally and respectfully). Diversity of thinking is the biggest trigger for human progress and invention.