Catheter ablation has been established as an important option in the treatment of patients with atrial fibrillation. This therapy currently carries a class I indication in patients with atrial fibrillation who have failed to respond to antiarrhythmic drug therapy and a class IIb indication in patients with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation untreated with antiarrhythmic agents (1). Although the evi...

A progression of univariate followed by multivariate analyses was applied to 46 variables selected from the clinical examination, exercise test, coronary arteriography, and quantitative angiographic assessment of left ventricular function in patients with coronary disease to determine those variables most predictive of survival. For the 733 medically treated patients, the final Cox's regression...

Although work on class III antiarrhythmics remains at an early stage, these agents still appear to possess greater efficacy and less proarrhythmia than conventional class I agents in those experimental arrhythmia models considered to be most representative of the clinical situation. Although prolongation of repolarization carries with its own tendency for pause-dependent arrhythmogenesis (i.e.,...

Heart rate variability (HRV) is the variation of the time interval between consecutive heartbeats and depends on the extrinsic regulation of the heart rate. It can be quantified using nonlinear methods such as entropy measures, which determine the irregularity of the time intervals. In this work, approximate entropy (ApEn), sample entropy (SampEn), fuzzy entropy (FuzzyEn) and fuzzy measure entr...

Atrial fibrillation is a common arrhythmia frequently seen in surgical patients. The onset of new atrial fibrillation during the peri-operative period is less common. There are many possible precipitating factors, although volatile agents themselves may have an antifibrillatory action. The management of atrial fibrillation includes removal of any precipitating factors and treatment of the arrhy...

BACKGROUND Survival was prolonged in selected patients with sustained ventricular arrhythmias who received implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) in the antiarrhythmics versus implantable defibrillators (AVID) study. The Midlands trial of empirical amiodarone versus electrophysiologically guided intervention and cardioverter implant in ventricular arrhythmias (MAVERIC) registry is a pop...

Coronary spasm is an important and often overlooked etiology of chest pain. Although coronary spasm, or Prinzmetal's angina, has been thought of as benign, contemporary studies have shown serious associated adverse outcomes, including acute coronary syndrome, arrhythmia, and death. Definitive diagnosis of coronary spasm can at times be difficult, given the transience of symptoms. Numerous agent...

OBJECTIVE To review evaluation and treatment of patients with ventricular arrhythmias, based on recent studies, with an emphasis on randomized controlled trials. DATA SOURCES MEDLINE search of English-language publications of ventricular arrhythmias and their references from 1966 through April 27, 1998. References to articles were also scanned to broaden the search. STUDY SELECTION Randomiz...

Thirty patients with ventricular tachyarrhythmias, which had not responded to intensive therapy with up to five antiarrhythmic drugs, were treated with bretylium tosylate. All patients had recurrenit ventricular tachycardia, and 12 had repeated episodes of ventricular fibrillation. In 17 patients the arrhythmias followed acute myocardial infarction. Bretylium was administered intramuscularly or...