The electrocardiogram 102 years after Einthoven.

In 2002, we celebrated in the Netherlands the 100th anniversary of Einthoven’s first publication on the electrocardiogram (ECG).1,2 During the past century, the ECG has become indispensable for rapid diagnosis and management of patients with a wide variety of cardiac diseases. As pointed out by Fisch,3 the ECG is an easily available, patient-friendly, noninvasive, inexpensive, and reproducible technique, without peer for the diagnosis of myocardial ischemia, cardiac arrhythmias, structural changes of the myocardium, drug effects, and electrolyte and metabolic disturbances. Twenty years ago, we reviewed the advances in electrocardiology at that time.4 Now, we would like to discuss new information that can be obtained from the “simple” 12-lead ECG. The limited number of words allowed in an editorial makes it impossible to discuss the ionic and cellular basis of the normal and abnormal ECG and to look at recent studies that used more sophisticated and complex noninvasive techniques to obtain information about the electrical activity of the heart. We will focus on 4 areas in which new information that is useful in our daily cardiology practice has become available.