ClinicalVentricular tachycardiaRelationship between burden of premature ventricular complexes and left ventricular function
Section snippets
Patient characteristics
The subjects of this retrospective study were 174 consecutive patients (87 women, age 48 ± 13 years, ejection fraction [EF] 51% ± 13%) with frequent PVCs referred for catheter ablation (Table 1). One hundred forty-seven patients experienced palpitations for a mean duration of 59 ± 92 months. Seventeen patients were asymptomatic, and 10 patients had heart failure symptoms at presentation. LV dysfunction was present in 57 patients who had a mean EF of 35% ± 9%. Additionally, 42 of the 174
Baseline characteristics
Baseline characteristics are shown in Table 1, Table 2. Of the 174 patients, 57 had cardiomyopathy. By univariate analysis, male gender was associated with cardiomyopathy (hazard ratio [HR] 2.18, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.11 to 4.28; P = 0.02). However, male gender was not independently associated with cardiomyopathy by multivariate analysis. A total of 134 patients were treated with either a beta-blocker or a calcium channel blocker at the time of the procedure, with no difference between
Main findings
The main finding of this study is that a PVC burden of >24% is associated with PVC-induced cardiomyopathy, with a sensitivity and specificity of approximately 80%.
Cardiomyopathy and PVC burden
Frequent PVCs are known to be associated with a reversible form of cardiomyopathy, but an optimal cutoff value has not yet been described. In prior case reports, a burden as low as 4% was associated with cardiomyopathy.7
We demonstrated in this study that a cutoff value of >24% was strongly associated with the presence of
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Cited by (0)
Drs. Bogun and Oral received a grant from the Leducq Foundation.