Scientists conducted a pilot study on healthy children and adolescents to find out if a relatively low-cost screening helped in identifying children who were at risk for sudden cardiac arrest and they found that it was feasible to screen for undiagnosed heart conditions that increase the risk of sudden cardiac arrest.

The study leader, Victoria L. Vetter, at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said that they wanted to evaluate the feasibility of adding an ECG to cardiac screening of healthy school-aged children and they found that adding a 10-minute electrocardiogram to a history and physical examination actually helped in identifying unsuspected cases of potentially serious heart conditions.

Cardiac arrest is becoming a major health issue among children these days and it is caused by structural or electrical abnormalities in the heart that do not show any symptoms and may go undiagnosed.

The researchers evaluated 44 children from Children's Hospital's Care Network and they had to go through a medical family history questionnaire, a physical examination, an ECG and an echocardiogram.

"In our study, using ECG outperformed the history and physical examination and found previously unidentified potentially serious abnormalities that would not have been identified by history and physical examination alone”, the authors wrote.