The clinical management of implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) patients involves successful medical and psychosocial care to reduce mortality and morbidity. Desirable quality of life (QoL) and psychosocial outcomes for ICD patients are achievable for a majority of ICD patients. Patient critical events, such as ICD shocks or ICD recalls, may occur that can dramatically alter the course ...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of atrial fibrillation (AF) in the general population and to validate an administrative diagnosis register, ie, the National Patient Register (NPR), and an electrocardiography (ECG) database in estimating disease prevalence. METHODS The study was conducted in a well defined region in northern Sweden (population n=75,945) whi...

The Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD) is an implantable biomedical device that monitors and treats abnormal heartbeats when they occur. The device is attached to the heart with 1 to 3 leads that carry information from the heart to the ICD, allowing it to record heart function, selectively provide pacing if the heart beats too fast or too slowly, and/or administer high-energy shocks i...

BACKGROUND The subcutaneous implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (S-ICD) is recognized as a viable alternative to the transvenous ICD. The safety and efficacy of this device has been demonstrated in Western countries, but studies with S-ICD implantation in Japanese patients have not been reported. METHODS AND RESULTS Twelve patients received an S-ICD implant in our institute between Februar...

Introduction Although transvenous pacemakers and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICD) have long been the standard of care, they are not without significant drawbacks. In recent years, major advances have been achieved in leadless pacemaker technology and entirely subcutaneous ICD (S-ICD) systems that obviate intracardiac leads and hence carry the potential to reduce associated complica...

The shift from version 9 to version 10 of the ICD-code (“International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems”) causes enormous problems for the exploitation of medical data warehouses, since conventional data warehouses do not support the change of the structure of dimensions, i.e. the content and relationships of master data like the diagnostic codes, or other key ...

BACKGROUND Cardiac-resynchronization therapy (CRT) benefits patients with left ventricular systolic dysfunction and a wide QRS complex. Most of these patients are candidates for an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD). We evaluated whether adding CRT to an ICD and optimal medical therapy might reduce mortality and morbidity among such patients. METHODS We randomly assigned patients wi...

BACKGROUND Despite the survival benefit of implantable-cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs), the vast majority of patients receiving an ICD for primary prevention do not receive ICD therapy. We sought to assess the role of heterogeneous scar area (HSA) identified by late gadolinium enhancement cardiovascular magnetic resonance (LGE-CMR) in predicting appropriate ICD therapy for primary prevention...

This research study examined the usefulness of the ICD-10-CM system in capturing public health diseases (reportable diseases or the nationally notifiable infectious diseases, leading causes of death, and morbidity/mortality related to terrorism), when compared to ICD-9-CM.1-3 It also examined agreement levels of coders when coding public health diseases in both ICD-10-CM and ICD-9-CM. Overall r...

AIMS There are limited data regarding the effect of diabetes mellitus (DM) on the risks of both appropriate and inappropriate implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) therapy. The present study was designed to compare the outcome of appropriate and inappropriate ICD therapy in patients with or without DM. METHODS AND RESULTS The risk of a first appropriate ICD therapy for ventricular tach...