Two minutes.
That's how long two-year-old Briar Curtis's heart stopped during a severe seizure in April 2025.
Since birth and before, Briar had been sick. Her heart rate in the womb was high and erratic. She lost far too much weight shortly after she was born. She'd had periodic seizures before, often enough that her mother, Lateishia Curtis, feared to leave her in a room by herself for even a moment. But this was the worst yet.
When Briar started seizing, Lateishia immediately began CPR. She brought Briar back from the brink and rushed her to the local hospital in Richfield, Utah. The hospital discharged Briar after a night's stay. But something was still very wrong. Briar was lethargic, shy, lacking the strength to even sit up.
And inside Briar's chest, a heart monitor placed a year earlier was recording information that was going to save her life.
From research to recording
A loop recorder is designed to continuously monitor heart activity for problems. It's a battery-powered device about the size of a pen cap, implanted under the skin of the chest. And it's very, very unusual for a two-year-old to have one.
But the story of Briar's heart monitor started years before she was ever born, with a University of Utah Health researcher who was trying to figure out what causes unexpected death in young people.
Martin Tristani-Firouzi, MD, Briar's cardiologist and a researcher at University of Utah Health and Intermountain Primary Children's Hospital, was studying the genetics of sudden death when he uncovered a surprising connection between epilepsy and heart problems.
By analyzing a database that included genetic information for hundreds of patients, Tristani-Firouzi had found that children who had died suddenly were more likely to have dangerous changes in genes related to heart problems-which he had expected-but were also more likely to have changes in genes related to severe epilepsy, like Briar's.
"That was something we weren't expecting to see," Tristani-Firouzi says. It made him wonder if kids with epilepsy were more likely to have heart problems.
Based on his research findings and the specifics of Briar's medical condition, Tristani-Firouzi offered to implant a loop recorder to monitor her heartbeat and alert clinicians if anything went wrong.
And in April 2025, it did.
A life-saving intervention
When Briar got back from the hospital after the worst seizure of her life, Lateishia knew her daughter was still very sick. The day after her discharge from the hospital, her suspicions were confirmed by an urgent call from Tristani-Firouzi.
The loop recorder confirmed that Briar's heart had stopped beating for over two minutes. "I told Lateishia, 'Pack your bags,'" Tristani-Firouzi says. "'You've got to come into the hospital, and we're going to admit you, and we have to put a pacemaker in. Come right now, this is too dangerous to be sitting around at home.'"
With Briar in tow, Lateishia made the three-hour drive up to Intermountain Primary Children's Hospital that evening. It was a long, terrifying night. But the next morning, Reilly Hobbs, MD, a pediatric heart surgeon at University of Utah Health and Intermountain Primary Children's Hospital, showed up. He checked in on Briar and Lateishia to reassure them before he even clocked in.
Hobbs did surgery to give Briar a pacemaker that would restart her heart if it stopped again, potentially saving her life.
He says that, for such a young child, the surgery couldn't have happened without Tristani-Firouzi's discoveries to back it up.
"I don't think that in any other circumstance this child would have gotten a pacemaker," Hobbs says. "She went from having the loop recorder to having a permanent pacemaker that can give her heart signals to beat if she has another event like that, because of the research that supported this approach."
A brighter future
By now, half a year after getting her pacemaker, Briar's energy level has utterly transformed, Lateishia says.
She's a whole different child. She went from being a little girl who I didn't think would be going to school, who I didn't think would be able to enjoy riding a bike-even walking down the driveway was hard for her-and now she is enrolled in preschool. She's wild, she has energy, she has this spirit and this certain little spark about her that you just love. It's like everything that she's missed for so long is finally here.
Hobbs says that scientific research formed the backbone of medical care for Briar and all of his patients, providing the foundation of knowledge that doctors need to know how to best help people. "Everything we do for kids, we want to be evidence-based," he says. "Research is the only way for us to have good evidence-based practice."
Lateishia credits Briar's recovery to the genetic research that discovered the connection between her seizures and her heart condition. Without Tristani-Firouzi's research, Briar wouldn't have had a heart monitor. And without the monitor, doctors wouldn't have known she needed a pacemaker. "The research that has been put into Briar's condition and other people's conditions is life-saving," Lateishia says. "Without it, she wouldn't be here."
