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

January 24-31, 1998
Marilleva, Trento, Italy

RT-232

Correlation between heart rate variability and ventricular arrhythmias. Different patterns in patients with myocardial infarction and arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy

Antonio Franco Folino, Gianfranco Buja, Lorenza Dal Corso, Andrea Nava.
Department of Cardiology, University of Padua, Italy

Introduction

Different studies demonstrated that both time and frequency domain analysis of heart rate variability provide a useful method to assess autonomic nervous system. Moreover, these methods showed a good reliability as predictors of mortality after acute myocardial infarction. However, in spite of a well documented correlation between ventricular arrhythmias and autonomic nervous system^1,2 through its sympathetic and parasympathetic outflows, controversial results emerged from the analysis of the correlation between ventricular arrhythmias and heart rate variability.

Neural mechanisms involved in ventricular tachyarrhythmias were well studied in patients with myocardial infarction and ischemia. In arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC) the frequent occurrences of tachyarrhythmias during exercise³ and sympathetic stimulation⁴ as well as the efficacy of beta-blockers agent in the treatment of the ventricular arrhythmias⁵, suggest a relevant role of the autonomic nervous system in the genesis of the arrhythmias in this cardiomyopathy.

The aim of our study was to evaluate heart rate variability and its correlation with ventricular arrhythmias in patients with myocardial infarction (MI) and ARVC.