Association for Inherited Cardiac Conditions (AICC)

We aim to provide consistent, top quality education and training, advice on management and best practice, as well as acting as a forum for data collection, audit and collaborative research. Membership is open to clinicians, nurses, counsellors, scientists and professions allied to medicine, as well as to persons from organisations and charities involved in support of such families.

Management of inherited cardiac conditions is currently one of the most rapidly evolving areas in cardiology. The last decade has seen a major change in our recognition of these conditions from apparently rare isolated disorders, to a group which collectively are common and which may be associated with the tragedy of unnecessary sudden death.

Website: https://www.theaicc.org/

Contact: aicc@bcs.com

Follow @AICCUK on Twitter

AICC Council

Jan Till - President

Jan is current president of the AICC, having served as a council member for some years and is passionate about raising awareness and identifying ways in which we can improve care of patients and families living their lives with ICC. Her major interest is device treatment, genetics and management of channelopathies.

Jan works at the Royal Brompton Hospital - where she helped build the inherited cardiac conditions unit - as a consultant in congenital electrophysiology and is Co-Director of Children's services at the Trust, and leads in Channelopathies, caring for both adults and children with channelopathies.

Catherine Mercer - Secretary

Dr Mercer is a Consultant Clinical Geneticist at University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust and is the lead clinician for Cardiac Genetics across the Wessex region. Dr Mercer has developed the Cardiac Genetics Service across the region to increase clinical capacity and ensure equity of patient access across the region. In addition, Dr Mercer was the Rare Disease Lead for the 100,000 Genomes Project in Wessex, involved in driving the delivery of this NHS transformational project. While most passionate about service delivery, she also has a research background with a PhD in the molecular genetic causes of congenital heart disease, specifically left ventricular outflow tract obstruction. She was elected as Secretary for the AICC in July 2019

Melanie Watson – Treasurer

Claire Turner - Consultant Clinical Geneticist

Gerry Carr-White - Cardiologist

John Dean - Geneticist

John Dean is a Consultant in Clinical Genetics for NHS Grampian, based in Aberdeen. He is also Joint Lead Clinician for the Network for Inherited Cardiac Conditions Scotland. His special interests include Long QT syndrome, Marfan Syndrome and the molecular investigation of Sudden Cardiac Death. He is Emeritus Reader in Medicine at the University of Aberdeen.

Lynne Millar - Trainee Representative Cardiology

Saidi (Sam) Mohiddin - Cardiologist

Consultant Cardiologist in Inherited and Acquired Heart Muscle Disease and in Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Barts Health NHS Trust.

Sam Mohiddin trained in Edinburgh, in the USA at the National Institutes of Health and in London. He completed his training in Cardiology in 2010 and is a Consultant and Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer at the Barts Heart Centre. Sam was a lead author of the national training curriculum for Inherited Cardiac Conditions and has an active role in sub-specialty education.

He has active research interests in inflammatory (myocarditis) and inherited heart muscle diseases and in the use of Cardiac resonance imaging (Cardiac MRI) in the assessment of these & other conditions.

Stephen Page - Cardiologist

Stephen Page is a Consultant Cardiologist & Electrophysiologist at Leeds General Infirmary.

He trained in Newcastle before moving to London to train as a cardiologist. His MD in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy at The Heart Hospital introduced him to the world of inherited cardiac conditions, before training in electrophysiology and inherited arrhythmia syndromes at Barts. He now leads the Inherited Cardiovascular Conditions Service in Leeds. His main focus is on clinical service development but is research active with established links with Imperial College and St George’s University.

Nora Shannon - Consultant Clinical Geneticist

Mary Sheppard - Cardiac Pathologist

Kate Thomson - Allied Health Professional

Kate is an experienced Clinical Scientist and a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists. She has specialised in inherited cardiac conditions for over 17 years, and is the lead for inherited cardiac disorders in the Oxford Medical Genetics Laboratory (OMGL). She recently completed a DPhil in Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford, where her research focused on the genetic basis of inherited cardiomyopathies.

Claire Turner - Consultant Clinical Geneticist

Rachel Walker – Genetic Nurse

Rachel has 23 years’ experience working in within cardiology, most recently as ICC nurse specialist in the South Yorkshire Regional ICC service for the last 13 years.

Her long experience of running nurse-led clinics has given her an intimate understanding of the needs of ICC patients and their families and the unique nature of the care they need.

Her role was initially funded by Cardiomyopathy UK and subsequently had the opportunity to work for their helpline for a number of years. This gave her an appreciation of the variations in the availability of ICC care throughout the country and the need for national approach to its management.

Although Rachel works with all ICCs, she has a particular interest in heart muscle disease.

Eleanor Wicks - Cardiologist

Dr Wicks is a Consultant Cardiologist and the Clinical Lead of the Inherited Cardiac Conditions (ICC) service at Oxford University Hospitals with longstanding specialist interests in acquired and inherited conditions, genomics, heart failure (HF) and multimodality imaging. She studied Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. After qualifying in 2004, she trained in General Medicine, gaining membership of the Royal College of Physicians in 2009 and completed her general cardiology training at Barts Heart Centre, London, UK. She was appointed as a Consultant Cardiologist with dual accreditation in General Medicine in 2016 and moved to Oxford to become clinical lead of the HF and ICC service in 2017. In 2019 she became an Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at the University of Oxford.

Over the past 5 years she has established a national and international reputation in the field of HF and heart muscle disease, authoring >10 peer reviewed papers on the subject. She sits on the ESC Working Group for Myocardial and Pericardial Diseases, the executive committee for the Cardiomyopathy UK charity and the Association of Inherited Cardiovascular Conditions (AICC). She was instrumental as the registry fellow for the European Outcomes Research Programme (EORP) registry on cardiomyopathies. At a day-to-day level, she combines her energy and enthusiasm with clinical leadership and service delivery with the operational management of a UK flagship, large multidisciplinary, multi-professional specialist team providing integrated cardiomyopathy evaluation alongside DNA diagnostics as one of the UK’s genomic hubs. She harnesses clinical and academic synergy via a collaborative network to define disease mechanisms and ensure the translation of novel molecular biological and clinical research approaches into clinical practice which has transformed the care for families nationally. She utilises state-of-the-art genomics and imaging for rich phenotyping to help reveal the molecular, imaging and genetic basis of inherited and acquired heart diseases in search of improved diagnoses, streamlined clinical screening, risk stratification and the exploration of potential therapeutic targets in the hope of delivering personalised therapy with substantial benefits for patients.

Eleanor hopes to propel forward innovative, holistic redesign of services to exceed quality standards and deliver optimal comprehensive services to improve the diagnosis, therapy and risk stratification of cardiomyopathies whilst integrating collaborative, pioneering research routinely in clinical practice. Her business, governance and technical mindset embraces automation and AI and hopes to integrate these concepts within clinical practice to ensure the sustainability, transformation and financial efficiency of her services.