News
UCT researchers, through global collaboration, have identified a new gene that is a major cause of sudden death among young people and athletes.
The Cardiovascular Genetics team at the Hatter Institute at UCT, headed by Prof Bongani Mayosi and Dr Gasnat Shaboodien, continue to garner accolades and national media attention.
2017 marks the fourth year of the World Heart Federation Emerging Leaders programme and will focus on access to essential medicines for cardiovascular diseases. Despite the availability for decades of evidence-based medicines to prevent and treat CVD, their use is still very low.
The Cardiovascular Genetics research team (led by Prof Bongani (dean of UCT’s Faculty of Health Sciences) and Dr Gasnat Shaboodien (Deputy Director of the Cardiovascular Genetics unit, HICRA, UCT) that discovered that a mutation in the CDH2 gene can cause a disease known as arrhythmogenic right ventricle cardiomyopathy (ARVC) has raised public awareness of heart disease in South Africa to a whole new level.