A Co Antrim mother who lost her husband and two sons to the same generic heart condition is supporting an urgent appeal to help fund more lifesaving research.
Five years on from the death of her second child Niall (19) Sharon Lyttle from Glengormley says the pain of losing them never goes away.
In November 2018, Niall, an Ulster University student, had been out on a team-building event with classmates when he fell from a party bike in Belfast city centre.
Doctors said the cause of death was hypoxic brain injury and respiratory pneumonia, due to cardiac arrest.
“Losing Niall was a living nightmare especially after what I’d gone through losing his brother and dad,” said Sharon.
“It also gives me some comfort to know that the two boys are now with their daddy.”
It had been 10 years earlier that Niall had been diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a generic condition causes the heart muscle to become enlarged and can result in an irregular heartbeat.
His father Neil (40) had died from the disease in 2009, a year after his brother Ryan (13).
Ryan’s death was said at the time to have been the result of an asthma attack, but following his dad’s death, it was presumed the teenager also had a cardiomyopathy.
Sharon and her family have raised thousands of pounds for charities in Niall’s memory and said the generosity of people has been “overwhelming”.
She added: “People have been amazing in their support over the past number of years but more needs to be done to help people out there suffering from inherited heart conditions.
“I would encourage everyone to donate to the British Heart Foundation to help fund more lifesaving research to prevent other families going through the heartbreak I am.”
Her plea comes as a researcher, whose family hail from Belfast and Newry, is working to develop a cure for inherited heart muscle diseases which affect around 8,000 people in the north.
Dr Kathryn McGurk is a cardiovascular geneticist and part of the Imperial College London team working on the CureHeart programme.
The BHF research aims to understand more about the genetic risk factors of cardiovascular diseases and their effects on heart structure and function.
Dr McGurk said: “I use data science and bioinformatics to understand more about how our genetics affects the heart so we can advance clinical practice.
“At Imperial College London, we link large-scale genetic analyses with computer vision of heart imaging to develop better risk prediction and therapy response.
“Our involvement in CureHeart surrounds implementing new genetic therapies: identifying which patients will benefit from new genetic therapies and what we need to measure to demonstrate that benefit in a clinical trial.”
She added: “The goal of the entire CureHeart team is to develop cures for inherited heart muscle diseases, which are the leading cause of sudden cardiac death in young people. With the progress we have made, we hope to be able to start clinical trials within five years.”
