A world-leading comprehensive registry to drive new insights into sudden cardiac death

Dr Elizabeth Paratz, St Vincents Institute of Medical Research

Postdoctoral Fellowship

Years funded: 2025 - 2026

Addressing the burden of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA)

Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) affects 20,000 Australians per year but is under-appreciated as a critical public health issue as 90% of deaths occur pre-hospital and are managed by ambulance and forensic services. Identifying strategies to reduce the burden of SCA has been described as the 'philosopher's stone of modern cardiology.'

The CODEX-SD Registry: A world-first comprehensive cardiac arrest database

The COmprehensive Database to EXamine Sudden Death (CODEX-SD Registry) is a linkage of twenty years of data from two large data sources, the Victorian Ambulance Cardiac Arrest Registry and the National Coronial Information Services. Both these services maintain data on all cases managed for the last twenty years, but not in a digitally compatible format.

The CODEX-SD Registry will be a world-first cohort registry in both its size (initially approximately 120,000 retrospective cases then maintained prospectively) and its inclusion of a control arm of trauma-related deaths to provide normative forensic data. It will provide the world's first true comprehensive case capture of all cases managed state-wide with complete case adjudication of all cases of SCA. This will provide a substantive resource to investigate many and diverse cardiac research questions.

Benefits from the CODEX-SD Registry are an unparalleled resource for defining the burden of cardiac diseases, the opportunity for detailed analysis of rare conditions (including those primarily affecting disadvantaged Australians), and the creation of the first cardiac arrest dataset in the world with a control cohort.

This Postdoctoral Funding will fund Dr Paratz's ongoing work to build the CODEX-SD registry. This will allow the main investigator the opportunity to build the registry, focusing on data analysis, large-scale collaborations and attracting high-quality researchers as co-investigators.