Tetralogy of Fallot (TOF) is the most common cyanotic congenital heart disease. It is characterized by an interventricular communication with an overriding aorta, subpulmonary obstruction, and consequent right ventricular hypertrophy. The potential for late complications is an important concern for growing number of survivors after surgical repair, although long-term survival rates are excellent. Progressive pulmonary valve regurgitation leading to right heart failure and arrhythmias are common late complications and major reasons of mortality. In this review, we focus on research progress of pathogenesis and treatment of late complications after TOF repair, and the importance of long-term follow-up is emphasized.
Objective To systematically review the effectiveness of amiodarone in treating repurfusion arrhythmia (RA) after thrombolytic therapy for acute myocardial infarction (AMI), so as to provide high quality evidence for formulating the rational thrombolytic therapy for AMI. Methods Randomized controlled trails (RCTs) on amiodarone in treating RA after thrombolytic therapy for AMI were electronically retrieved in PubMed, EMbase, The Cochrane Library (Issue 3, 2012), CBM, CNKI, VIP and WanFang Data from inception to January, 2013. According to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, two reviewers independently screened literature, extracted data, and assessed quality. Then RevMan 5.1 software was used for meta-analysis. Results A total of 5 RCTs involving 440 patients were included. The results of meta-analysis suggested that, compared with the blank control, amiodarone reduced the incidence of RA after thrombolytic therapy in treating AMI (RR=0.60, 95%CI 0.48 to 0.74, Plt;0.000 01) and the incidence of ventricular fibrillation (RR=0.47, 95%CI 0.26 to 0.85, P=0.01). It neither affected the recanalization rate of occluded arteries after thrombolytic therapy (RR=1.00, 95%CI 0.88 to 1.15, P=0.94) nor decreased the mortality after surgery (RR=0.33, 95%CI 0.10 to 1.09, P=0.07). Conclusion Current evidence indicated that, amiodarone can decrease the incidence of RA. Unfortunately, the mortality rate can’t be reduced by amiodarone. Due to the limited quality and quantity of the included studies, more high quality studies are needed to verify the above conclusion
Atrial fibrillation （AF） as a most frequent arrhythmia has a high incidence of 79% in patients with mitral valve disease. Thrombosis, embolization and serious arrhythmia can be caused by AF. There is the recrudescent tendency in using drugs to recover the sinus rhythm, surgery and radio frequency ablation can only cure a part of patients. By now the pathogenesis of AF is not known clearly. The pathogenesis of AF from virulence gene, cardiac electrophysiology, connecxins, cell ultramicrostructure and cell signaling system are reviewed in this article.
Electrocardiogram (ECG) can visually reflect the physiological electrical activity of human heart, which is important in the field of arrhythmia detection and classification. To address the negative effect of label imbalance in ECG data on arrhythmia classification, this paper proposes a nested long short-term memory network (NLSTM) model for unbalanced ECG signal classification. The NLSTM is built to learn and memorize the temporal characteristics in complex signals, and the focal loss function is used to reduce the weights of easily identifiable samples. Then the residual attention mechanism is used to modify the assigned weights according to the importance of sample characteristic to solve the sample imbalance problem. Then the synthetic minority over-sampling technique is used to perform a simple manual oversampling process on the Massachusetts institute of technology and Beth Israel hospital arrhythmia (MIT-BIH-AR) database to further increase the classification accuracy of the model. Finally, the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database is applied to experimentally verify the above algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively solve the issues of imbalanced samples and unremarkable features in ECG signals, and the overall accuracy of the model reaches 98.34%. It also significantly improves the recognition and classification of minority samples and has provided a new feasible method for ECG-assisted diagnosis, which has practical application significance.
The judgment of the type of arrhythmia is the key to the prevention and diagnosis of early cardiovascular disease. Therefore, electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis has been widely used as an important basis for doctors to diagnose. However, due to the large differences in ECG signal morphology among different patients and the unbalanced distribution of categories, the existing automatic detection algorithms for arrhythmias have certain difficulties in the identification process. This paper designs a variable scale fusion network model for automatic recognition of heart rhythm types. In this study, a variable-scale fusion network model was proposed for automatic identification of heart rhythm types. The improved ECG generation network (EGAN) module was used to solve the imbalance of ECG data, and the ECG signal was reproduced in two dimensions in the form of gray recurrence plot (GRP) and spectrogram. Combined with the branching structure of the model, the automatic classification of variable-length heart beats was realized. The results of the study were verified by the Massachusetts institute of technology and Beth Israel hospital (MIT-BIH) arrhythmia database, which distinguished eight heart rhythm types. The average accuracy rate reached 99.36%, and the sensitivity and specificity were 96.11% and 99.84%, respectively. In conclusion, it is expected that this method can be used for clinical auxiliary diagnosis and smart wearable devices in the future.
ObjectiveTo discuss the anesthetic procedure for left thoracic sympathectomy under thoracoscope for long QT syndrome patients. MethodsWe selected 8 patients with long QT syndrome classified American Society of Anesthesiologists Ⅱ-Ⅲ who were going to undergo left thoracic sympathectomy under thoracoscope between July 2011 and October 2014 as our study subjects. They were given a moderate amount of beta blockers before operation, inducted with 0.1 mg/kg midazolam, 3-6 μg/kg fentanyl, 2-4 mg/kg propofol, 0.3-0.6 mg/kg cis-atracurium, and maintained with propofol 1-4 mg/(kg·h) combined with 0.025-2.000 μg/(kg·min) fentanyl. We recorded the mean arterial pressure (MAP), heart rate (HR), pulse oxygen saturation (SpO2) and airway peak pressure, and end-tidal carbon dioxide before anesthesia induction (T0), at endotracheal intubation (T1), during artificial lung-collapse when surgery initiated (T2), 5 minutes after surgery initiation (T3), 15 minutes after surgery initiation (T4), during artificial lung-collapse at the end of surgery (T5) and during extubation (T6). ResultsWhen compared with T0, T2 got a higher MAP, T3 and T4 had a slower HR (P<0.05), but all were within a normal range. All the patients showed little change in airway peak pressure and end-tidal carbon dioxide during the surgery with no statistically significant difference (P>0.05). ConclusionProper anesthetic procedure for left thoracic sympathectomy under thoracoscope for long QT syndrome patients can reduce the incidence of perioperative malignant arrhythmia.
Atrial fibrillation is the most common arrhythmia in clinical practice, and catheter ablation has become a first-line treatment strategy. Among them, cryoballoon ablation has become a standardized treatment for atrial fibrillation due to its advantages such as short surgical time, short learning curve, and minimal patient pain. Currently, a large amount of clinical practice and research have provided new evidence for cryoballoon ablation as a first-line treatment for atrial fibrillation. Therefore, this article provides a review of the current status of catheter ablation, the current status, challenges faced, and prospects as a first-line catheter ablation strategy for atrial fibrillation of cryoballoon ablation, with the aim of providing reference for cardiologists in clinical decision-making in the initial rhythm control of atrial fibrillation.
Objective To summary the clinical experiences of ventricular septal myotomymyectomy on hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy(HOCM) and investigate the treatment strategies during perioperative period for better clinical results. Methods From October 1996 to June 2009, 62 patients with HOCM underwent surgical treatment. There were 41 male and 21 female, aged 668 years with mean 34.05 years. The ventricular septal myotomymyectomy operation (Morrow operation or modified Morrow operation) was performed through the aortic incision under general anesthesia and hypothermic cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). The concomitant operations included coronary artery bypass grafting (5 cases), mitral valve replacement (12 cases), mitral valve plasty(9 cases), aortic valve replacement (4 cases), tricuspid valve plasty(2 cases) and ductus arteriosus closure (2 cases). During the perioperative period, the patients were examined by echocardiography or transesophageal echocardiograph(TEE), electrocardiogram or dynamic echocardiogram and chest radiography. Left atrial diameter，left ventricular enddiastolic [CM(159mm]diameter，left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT) pressuregradient，interventricular septal thickness, ejection fraction[CM)](EF), the changes of mitral valve construction and function were evaluated. Results The time of CPB and aortic occlusion were 104.23±47.14 min and 66.76±36.32 min, respectively. The endotracheal intubation time was 13.23±11.76 h and the postoperative intensive care unit(ICU) stay was 42.53±37.41 h. Four patients died and the mortality was 6.45％(4/62). The main causes of death included septic shock complicated with acute renal failure(1 case), refractory arrhythmia, ventricular fibrillation, atrial flutter complicated with severe low cardiac output syndrome (1 case), severe acute renal failure(1 case) and Ⅲ°atrioventricular(AV) block complicated with low cardiac output syndrome(1 case). Postoperative left atrial diameter (34.56±6.45 mm vs.43.46±7.21 mm，t=6.948,P=0.000), left ventricular enddiastolic diameter (37.14±6.31 mm vs.42.03±6.23 mm，t=3.145,P=0.020), LVOT pressure gradient (23.54±17.78 mm Hg vs. 103.84±44.04 mm Hg,t=13.618,P=0.000) and interventricular septal thickness (17.12±5.67 mm vs.26.93±5.23 mm, t=10.694,P=0.000) decreased significantly compared with those before operation. There was no mitral valve regurgitation, or only mild mitral valve regurgitation. No systolic anterior motion(SAM) was found. The main postoperative arrhythmias included complete left bundle branch block, intraventricular block, complete atrioventricular block and atrial fibrillation. All the 58 cases were cured and discharged. Fiftythree cases were followed up for 3 months12 years, and 5 cases were lost. No death, complication and reoperation were found. Symptoms relieved significantly. The cardiac function was in New York Heart Association grade Ⅰ-Ⅱ. The quality of life improved significantly. Conclusion Most patients with HOCM can achieve satisfactory relief of LVOT obstruction and SAM via ventricular septal myotomymyectomy. The main arrhythmias after operation are bundle branch block and atrial fibrillation. Satisfactory effects can be achieved by accurate surgical technique and effective drug treatments.
Objective To explore how to differentiate the epilepsy and syncope in order to minimize the misdiagnosis. Methods Retrospectively analyzed the medical record of 6 cases which were misdiagnosed as epilepsy or syncope during April 2008 to September 2012 and reviewed the literatures about the differential diagnosis. Results Among the clinical characteristics, the ictal positional tone and loss of consciousness as well as the duration of postictal confusion are very important to the differential diagnosis. The ictal EEG shows highly rhythmic abnormal discharges when epileptic seizures occur. However, the ictal EEG would become slower and flatler during syncope. Conclusions When the automomic disorder and signs such as chest distress, arrhythmia. appear, the causes should not be limited in the cardiac diseases, the functional or structural abnormalities of the nervous system innervating the heart should also be considered; on the contrary, convulsions might not only due to the abnormal electrical activity in the brain, but syncope.
ObjectiveTo investigate the clinical efficacy and safety of carvedilol in the treatment of arrhythmia in patients with hypertension complicated with diabetes mellitus. MethodsWe selected the patients with hypertension complicated with diabetes mellitus who were hospitalized in the Harrison International Peace Hospital Affiliated to Hebei Medical University for treatment from Oct. 2011 to Oct. 2013. The cases were divided into a trial group and a control group. The control group was given routine treatment (eg., hypoglycaemic drugs, angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors). On the basis of the same treatment of the control group, the trial group was given carvedilol. The efficacy and adverse reaction were observed, recorded and then analyzed between the two groups. ResultsA total of 140 patients were included (70 cases in each group). With the loss of 10 cases in the control group, the data of 70 cases in the trial group and 60 cases in the control group were finally analyzed. The results showed that the trial group was superior to the control group in the total effectiveness (χ2=8.320, P=0.004) and the dynamic ECG improvement of premature ventricular contraction (χ2=5.333, P=0.014) with significant differences. Both groups were significantly improved in blood pressure and heart beats compared with the situation before treatment (Both P < 0.05), and the trial group was better than the control group with a significant difference. During the treatment, three cases in the trial group had mild gastrointestinal symptoms which spontaneously disappeared later. ConclusionThe clinical effectiveness of carvedilol for arrhythmia in patients with hypertension complicated with diabetes mellitus is significant. It is safe and effective which is recommended in clinical application.