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

January 24-31, 1998
Marilleva, Trento, Italy

RT-106

Late potentials and mitral valve prolapse: incidence and clinical implications

Emanuele Palumbo, Alberto Cresti, Nedo Svetoni, Gennaro Miracapillo, Elena Mazzella, Teodomiro Lanzetta.
Divisione di Cardiologia, Ospedale della Misericordia, Azienda USL 9, Grosseto, Italy

Introduction

Mitral valve prolapse (MVP) is a common valvular disease with an incidence of 5-10% in the general population. This condition is usually asymptomatic and benign. It is also known that a subset of patients with MVP is at risk of sudden death. Moreover in an autoptic study sudden death has been demonstrated to be the first symptom in the 53% of patients with isolated MVP¹. Late potentials have been recently proposed as non invasive marker of electrical instability in MVP^2-4.

The aim of this study is: 1) to evaluate the incidence of late potentials in our group of patients with MVP and correlate it with a group of healthy subjects; 2) to find out possible correlations between late potentials and clinical, electrocardiographic end echocardiographic features.