DAILYMAIL.COM – Susan Weiss Liebman spent years searching for the minute genetic mutation lurking in her family’s DNA that had been causing unexplained abrupt deaths for generations.
Her investigation, detailed in her new book The Dressmaker’s Mirror, started with the sudden – and unexplainable – death of her niece Karen.
Karen was 36, otherwise healthy, and pregnant when she collapsed at a restaurant in Brooklyn in 2008 due to dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), a condition that causes the heart to become weak, enlarged, and unable to pump blood effectively.
This was the same condition Karen’s mother Diane had been dealing with for years. It was genetic, but no one would learn that for nearly a decade.
Dr Liebman writes: ‘This meant that Diane’s illness was genetic and wasn’t a complication of a viral infection, as doctors formerly assumed. Instead, Diane transmitted a deadly gene to Karen.’
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‘We had to find the mutation before God’s cruel game of Russian roulette picked off more members of the family.’
The tragedy, nearly a year after her father’s sudden fatal heart attack at 66, prompted the 78-year-old to use her expertise as a geneticist to find an answer.
She pored over research and corresponded with experts in the field about the latest discoveries in the variations of human DNA that make a person who they are.
Dr Liebman soon learned many members of her family had inherited a potentially lethal gene mutation responsible for making a protein crucial for maintaining the function and structure of muscle cells, including those that make up the heart …