Register for email alerts and news feeds:
This journal | BMJ Group
rss
Heart 2001;85:610-612; doi:10.1136/heart.85.6.610
Copyright © 2001 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd & British Cardiovascular Society
Heart 2001;85:610-612 ( June )

Editorial

Implantable loop recorder: towards a gold standard for the diagnosis of syncope?

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Syncope is a transient symptom and not a disease. Typically, patients are asymptomatic at the time of evaluation and the opportunity to capture a spontaneous event during diagnostic testing is rare. As a result, diagnostic evaluation has focused on the detection of abnormalities that could plausibly cause loss of consciousness. This type of reasoning necessarily leads to uncertainty in establishing a cause. In other words, the causal relation between an abnormality found during the diagnostic workup and syncope is often presumptive. Indeed, in the tests used to evaluate the aetiology of syncope, it is not possible to measure test sensitivity and specificity, owing to the lack of a reference standard for most of the tests. Because of the episodic behaviour of syncope, the opportunity of correlating the spontaneous syncopal episodes with an abnormal finding can be considered as a reference standard.

Role of the implantable loop recorder

An implantable ECG . . . [Full text of this article]
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

  • Turley, A. J., Tynan, M. M., Plummer, C. J. (2009). Time to manual activation of implantable loop recorders--implications for programming recording period: a 10-year single-centre experience. Europace 11: 1359-1361 [Abstract] [Full Text]  
  • Zysko, D., Gajek, J., Kozluk, E., Mazurek, W. (2009). Electrocardiographic characteristics of atrioventricular block induced by tilt testing. Europace 11: 225-230 [Abstract] [Full Text]  
  • Auer, J. (2008). Syncope and trauma. Are syncope-related traumatic injuries the key to find the specific cause of the symptom?. Eur Heart J 29: 576-578 [Full Text]  
  • Farwell, D. J., Freemantle, N., Sulke, N. (2006). The clinical impact of implantable loop recorders in patients with syncope. Eur Heart J 27: 351-356 [Abstract] [Full Text]  
  • Farwell, D.J., Freemantle, N., Sulke, A.N. (2004). Use of implantable loop recorders in the diagnosis and management of syncope. Eur Heart J 25: 1257-1263 [Abstract] [Full Text]  
  • Garcia-Civera, R., Ruiz-Granell, R., Morell-Cabedo, S., Sanjuan-Manez, R., Perez-Alcala, F., Plancha, E., Navarro, A., Botella, S., LLacer, A. (2003). Selective use of diagnostic tests inpatients with syncope of unknown cause. J Am Coll Cardiol 41: 787-790 [Abstract] [Full Text]  

This Article

Services
Citing Articles
Google Scholar
PubMed
Topic Collections
Bookmark with

Register for free content

The full back archive is now available for all BMJ Journals. Institutional subscribers may access the entire archive as part of their subscription. Personal subscribers will also have access to all content when logged in. Non-subscribers who register have free access to all articles published before 2006 right back to volume 1 issue 1. Register here to access the free archive of all BMJ Journals.

Don't forget to sign up for content alerts so you keep up to date with all the articles as they are published.

Show me all >>