Background. Radiofrequency energy has been used safely and successfully to eliminate accessory pathways in patients with the Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome and the substrate for atrioventricular nodal reentrant tachycardia. However, this form of ablation has had only limited success in eliminating ventricular tachycardia in patients with structural heart disease. In contrast, direct-current cat...

To study whether myocardial infarction differs in patients with and without ventricular tachycardia, the hearts of 22 deceased patients with ventricular tachycardia and 21 deceased control patients were analyzed quantitatively. The hearts from the ventricular tachycardia group were heavier and more dilated than those from the control group. Histologic analysis of a representative cross section ...

A fetus who was diagnosed at 25 weeks of gestation with isoimmune AV block presented at 34 weeks with a precipitous fall in ventricular rate and periods of tachycardia. Magnetocardiography revealed the tachycardia to be ventricular. After delivery, nonsustained ventricular tachycardia continued. The baby then successfully paced, and at higher ventricular rates the tachycardia resolved. Five yea...

BACKGROUND Tachycardia-induced cardiomyopathy is a reversible cause of heart failure. We hypothesized that although left ventricular ejection fraction measurements normalize after heart rate or rhythm control in patients with tachycardia-induced cardiomyopathy, recurrent tachycardia may have abrupt and deleterious consequences. METHODS AND RESULTS Patients with tachycardia-induced cardiomyopa...

BACKGROUND Development of ventricular fibrillation or pulseless ventricular tachycardia after an initial rhythm of pulseless electrical activity or asystole is associated with significantly increased cardiac arrest mortality. OBJECTIVE To examine differences in epinephrine administration during cardiac arrest between patients who had a secondary ventricular fibrillation or ventricular tachyca...

Figure 1 represents the electrocardiographic tracings obtained from a 59-year-old man admitted with an acute anterior wall myocardial infarction. Several hours following admission, ventricular tachycardia at a rate of 125 beats! mm appeared (Fig 1, top strip). This tachycardia was easily terminated by a chest thump. Five minutes later, ventricular tachycardia with identical morphology but faste...

OBJECTIVES This report presents the largest consecutive series to date of radiofrequency ablation in the treatment of post infarction ventricular tachycardia. METHODS One hundred and twelve consecutive patients were studied, with an average of 12 documented episodes of ventricular tachycardia in the month preceding the radiofrequency ablation. Seventy-four percent of the subjects had an eject...

We evaluated 126 patients with inducible sustained ventricular tachyarrhythmias to assess whether the response to procainamide during electrophysiologic study could predict responses to other conventional antiarrhythmic agents and combinations of agents. Thirty of 42 patients in whom tachycardia was not inducible after the administration of procainamide and 69 of 84 patients in whom ventricular...

Malignant early repolarization as cause of sudden death has taken on great importance in recent years. It been described an entity capable producing ventricular arrhythmic events, causing from episodes syncope to cardiac death. Ventricular fibrillation is the typical arrhythmia these patients, with no clear relationship date idiopathic monomorphic tachycardia. Electrocardiographic markers relat...