Evaluation of vectorcardiographic criteria for the diagnosis of myocardial infarction in the presence of left ventricular hypertrophy.

Vectorcardiograms (VCG) from a consecutive group of 77 patients with significant aortic valve disease were analyzed. All of the patients had complete left and right heart catheterization with normal coronary arteriograms and normal left ventricular contraction. Thirty-five (46%) patients met VCG criteria for anterior myocardial infarction (AMI-35%) and/or inferior myocardial infarction (IMI-14%). This was a significant increase in false positive diagnosis for both criteria compared to a group of 200 normal volunteers under age 30 and 100 patients with normal hearts by cardiac catheterization (P less than 0.01). It was found that if the VCG diagnosis of myocardial infarction was deferred when the maximal transverse plane magnitude was greater than 1.9 mV, the incidence of AMI false positive diagnosis decreased to 3% and the incidence of IMI false positive diagnosis decreased to 1%. The same rule was applied to the aortic valve disease cohort, a group of 124 patients with documented AMI and a group of 158 patients with IMI. This decreased the sensitivity of the AMI criteria from 93 to 83% and of the IMI criteria from 85 to 77%. The increase in average performance was statistically significant fro the AMI criteria (P less than 0.05) but not for the IMI criteria.