Italy is considering screening all newborn babies for heart abnormalities after the initial results of a pilot study suggested this could prevent up to 30 deaths in infancy and childhood in the country each year, said the New Scientist.
The aim of the pilot study is to screen 50,000 newborns. Based on the 21,000 screened so far, and an ongoing genetic study, the team calculates that between 10 and 15 per cent of all cases of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) are due to fatal heart rhythms, meaning identifying and treating these babies might prevent more than a tenth of the 300 SIDS cases per year in Italy.
"The critical issue is that some of these are avoidable deaths," says the lead researcher Peter Schwartz at the University of Pavia.
Schwartz presented his latest findings at the American Heart Association's meeting in New Orleans this week. He has been arguing for national screening programs since 1998, when his team published a controversial paper suggesting that many SIDS cases are caused by a rare inherited condition called long QT syndrome. This causes abnormal heart rhythms that can kill without leaving any clue to the cause of death.
In the pilot study, electrocardiograms are being recorded for all babies attending 16 clinics. Obtaining an ECG is a simple, cheap procedure in which 12 electrodes are placed on the chest. The ECGs are digitised and sent to a central lab for analysis. Any baby whose recovery period or QT interval (see graphic) is longer than 470 milliseconds - compared with the normal value of 440 milliseconds - is tested for gene mutations linked to long QT.
The study has so far picked up 24 babies with suspiciously long QT intervals. Of the five who have had genetic tests so far, four have mutations known to cause long QT. The screening also picked up three babies with other rare and potentially fatal heart conditions. None of the babies exhibited any symptoms, Schwartz stresses.

Smart 1 will shed light on Earth's only natural satellite.

European spacecraft Smart 1 is at the Moon's gateway, the region beyond which the probe is tugged more strongly by lunar gravity than by the Earth's, BBC News Online said.
Dr. Bernard Foing, chief scientist at the European Space Agency said the landmark was of symbolic importance.
On the night of Monday 15 November, Smart 1 will begin delicate maneuvers to bring it into orbit around the Moon.
Once captured by the Moon's gravity, it begins to spiral closer to the lunar surface until reaching its final orbit.
The probe will begin braking on Monday when it reaches a distance of about 50,000km. The ion engine will then fire continuously for four days as the spacecraft begins its inexorable spiral towards the Moon.
Eventually it will reach a stable elliptical orbit where it will range between 3,000km and 300km from the moon's surface.
Smart 1 will test a highly efficient solar-electric propulsion system as one of its key mission objectives.
The engine works by expelling a beam of charged xenon atoms--ions--from the back of the probe.
This produces thrust in the opposite direction, pushing the spacecraft forward. The energy to feed the system comes from the solar panels, hence the term "solar-electric".
When it begins its scientific investigations in January 2005, Sm carries an X-ray spectrometer called D-CIXS which will comprehensively map chemical elements on the Moon's surface. This will help scientists test theories of its birth and evolution.
"We believe that the Moon is the daughter of the Earth and it was created [4.5 billion years ago] when a planetary embryo the size of Mars impacted the Earth," Dr Foing explained.
"This sent some mantle of the Earth into orbit and the debris re-condensed to form the Moon."
Conversely, studying the Moon's origins and evolution could also shed light on the composition of the early Earth.
One target for D-CIXS is the biggest impact crater in the Solar System - a massive hole in the Moon more than 2,000 miles across on its far side.
By looking down the hole, it should be possible to analyze the composition of rocks deep within the Moon's interior.

The spin Hall effect has been seen in an experiment for the first time. The effect, which was predicted by theorists over 30 years ago, causes "spin-up" and "spin-down" electrons to build up on opposite sides of a sample in the presence of an electric field.
The ability to manoeuvre electron spins with an electric field rather than a magnetic field could prove useful for making "spintronic" devices that manipulate spin rather than charge.
The classic Hall effect occurs when an electric current flows through a conductor in a magnetic field. If the current and magnetic field are at right angles, the Lorentz force deflects the electrons and charge builds up on one side of the conductor.
This in turns produces a Hall voltage across the sample that is perpendicular to both the current and the magnetic field.
To detect the spin Hall effect David Awschalom and colleagues at the University of California at Santa Barbara used a scanning optical microscope to look for signs of spin accumulation in the characteristics of light reflected from semiconductor samples.
If the sample is illuminated with a linearly polarized laser beam, any region where spins have gathered will rotate the polarization in a process known as "Kerr rotation". The electric fields in the experiment were typically about 10 millivolts per micron.
The Santa Barbara physicists began by focusing the laser beam - to a spot size of about two microns - on two wafers of gallium arsenide and indium gallium arsenide. Then they scanned the spot across the wafers and measured the Kerr rotation at each position.
The results showed that oppositely polarized spins did indeed accumulate at the edges of the sample when an electric field was applied.
"The existence of the spin Hall effect shows it is possible to direct spins depending on their orientation within conventional semiconductor circuits in the absence of a magnetic field," Awschalom told PhysicsWeb.