Unravelling the fainting mystery

Research team’s study aims to find out if condition is genetic

Angel Redisky started fainting regularly over two years ago.

Before April 10, 2013, the day her granddaughter was born, she’d had a few fainting spells, but they were on hot days when she’d had little to eat.

Now she faints at least once every two weeks with no warning. Redisky is a nurse and says that when she first fainted at work, the doctors at the clinic put her through every test they could think of. A fainting spell can strike any time she’s standing, so her 22- year- old daughter Kara usually sticks with her.

“It sucks. It’s a little tough,” Redisky says.

“You just have to be careful, you’re a lot more cautious, right? Kara is pretty much always with me, or my husband, or somebody. I don’t go grocery shopping by myself ... it’s a little bit life changing that’s for sure.”

She and Kara listed some of the places where she has collapsed.

“I’ve fallen down a couple of flights of stairs, through a couple doors, bathroom wall, off a chair ...”

“That she shouldn’t have been on in the first place,” added Kara. “Fell into a pickup truck once. Into a boat, into a shelf at Walmart ...”

“In public is the worst,” Redisky said.

Redisky is now part of a study by Calgary researchers to determine if fainting is just in our genes.

Dr. Bob Sheldon, an Alberta Health Services cardiologist, says the goal of the study is to find out why some people — up to 40 per cent of Canadians — are fainters.

“What we’re really curious right now is, why do people faint?” said Dr. Sheldon

“If we can figure out the why, then we can look for treatments for that.”

Dr. Sheldon says that fainting, called syncope by doctors ( pronounced sin- ko- pea), is caused by a sudden drop in blood flow to the brain. It can be caused by long periods of standing or can happen in medical settings, like a nurse drawing blood or simply visiting a hospital. Doctors don’t know why this is, or why humans are the only animals that faint ( the popular fainting goat videos on the Internet are actually goats having a convulsion where their legs freeze up).

But to complete the genetic study of 1,000 fainters and 1,000 non- fainters, Dr. Sheldon and the team still need 200 fainters to fill out a one- page questionnaire and have a saliva test.

The research team is working on analyzing the genes from these spit tests, but is also running a clinical trial for new drugs to treat fainting and looking in to why talking to some patients seems to stop the episodes.

“One of the things we’re going to do at some point is see which of those are linked to people getting better on their own and which aren’t,” said Dr. Sheldon.

“Because then you could see somebody in a clinic, take a quick look at their genes, say, ‘ This person’s going to get better by talking, this one isn’t.’”

Angel Redisky just wants answers — and to leave the house alone.

“The magic pill would be lovely,” Redisky said.

“Falling on your head kinda sucks. Seriously, you can only do it so many times.”