A family’s medical mystery sheds light on the surprising ways disease-causing genes can be inherited
To her family, Tatiana Legkiy looked completely healthy when she was born. But a pediatrician who listened to her heart heard something off. So within a few days of being born, she saw a specialist who did an echocardiogram and who, alarmed by the results, called an ambulance to take her to the hospital in Modesto, Calif.
From there, she was rushed to a hospital in San Francisco. The newborn’s heart was failing.
“We could hear her screaming as soon as the elevator opened,” Lana Legkiy, Tatiana’s mother, recalled.
Clinicians there treated Tatiana and started medication that helped her heart pump. But while that emergency was ending, a years-long scientific search for answers was just beginning. Along the way, researchers would uncover an undiagnosed heart problem in Tatiana’s older sister, provide a new explanation for
