14th International Congress
THE "NEW FRONTIERS"
OF ARRHYTHMIAS 2000

Jan. 29 - Feb. 5, 2000
Marilleva, Trento, Italy

RT-134

Is there a relationship between the linear atrial radiofrequency ablation of atrial fibrillation and different parameters of intraatrial conduction time?

Ildiko J. Dobran, Heike Dees, Christian Perings, Marcus Hennersdorf, Ernst G. Vester.
Department of Cardiology, Pneumology and Angiology, Heinrich-Heine-University, Duesseldorf, Germany

Introduction

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia, occuring in 1-2% of the population and up to 10% of the erderly¹. Symptoms are often severe and difficult to control with drugs, especially with paroxysmal AF. Nonpharmacologic treatments for atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter offer potentially curative therapy while sparing patients the long-term risks of antiarrhythmic drug therapy. The importance of the radiofrequency catheter ablation (RA) in therapy of AF has increased in the last years. It has started from the AV node ablation and modification, but this procedure is palliative since AF and its related risks are persistent^2,3. It was followed by the catheter-based MAZE procedure⁴ and a few several reports have demonstrated that RF catheter ablation could effectively cure focal atrial fibrillation^5,6. The multilinear atrial radiofrequency ablation is a new procedure for the treatment of paroxysmal, no focal atrial fibrillation. At the present time, available new and curative treatments of AF are catheter ablation, using ablation lesions performed by sequential applications of radiofrequency energy to serve as a barrier for conduction and thus divide the atrial area available to multiple wavelet reentries that perpetuate the arrhythmia. The aim of our study was 1) to investigate the relationship between successful RA and changes of the intraatrial signal amplitude after RA; 2) to study the effect of RA on the intraatrial conduction time (A-H time and P_beginn-P_end/P-wave duration/).