13th International Congress
THE "NEW FRONTIERS"
OF ARRHYTHMIAS 1998

January 24-31, 1998
Marilleva, Trento, Italy

RT-103

Frequency domain analysis is useful to identify patients at risk of atrial fibrillation: a prospective study

Mauro Villani, Sabrina Iannuzzi, Gino Iannucci, Federico Caruso*, Cataldo Pisicchio, Daniela Imperiale, Giacinto Baciarello.
Arrhythmia Control Unit, La Sapienza University,
*MANFRI srl, Rome, Italy

Introduction

Atrial fibrillation is a very common and potentially dangerous cardiac arrhythmia¹. A significant amount of cerebro-vascular episodes are in fact due to thromboembolism in patients with fibrillating atria². A 5 fold embolic risk in the non rheumatic atrial fibrillation and 18 fold risk in the rheumatic group has been ascertained² and full anticoagulation is frequently recommended in patients with atrial fi-brillation in order to reduce the embolic risk³. This exposes particularly the elderly patients to an increased risk of haemorrhage. Furthermore the loss of atrial contraction can cause a significant haemodynamic trouble particularly in patients with diastolic impairment leading to congestive heart failure⁴. For these causes it can be useful to have the possibility to identify patients at risk of atrial fibrillation with a sample, reproducible and non invasive methodology. Several studies demonstrated that signal averaged ECG (SAECG) could be useful to detect patients at risk of atrial fibrillation. Moreover, prospective studies for clinical utilization of SAECG to study the P-wave are still necessary. The aim of this study was to investigate and evaluate if it is possible to identify, prospectively, patients at risk of relapse into atrial fibrillation, using SAECG in the time and frequency domain. On the other hand can the alterations or modification of time and/or frequency domain parameters predict the relapse into atrial fibrillation?