Cardiac electrophysiology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (February 2008)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Drawing of the EKG, with labels of intervals

Cardiac electrophysiology is the science of elucidating, diagnosing, and treating the electrical activities of the heart. The term is usually used to describe studies of such phenomena by invasive (intracardiac) catheter recording of spontaneous activity as well as of cardiac responses to programmed electrical stimulation (PES). These studies are performed to assess complex arrhythmias, elucidate symptoms, evaluate abnormal electrocardiograms, assess risk of developing arrhythmias in the future, and design treatment. These procedures increasingly include therapeutic methods (typically radiofrequency ablation) in addition to diagnostic and prognostic procedures. Other therapeutic modalities employed in this field include antiarrhythmic drug therapy and implantation of pacemakers and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (AICD).

The cardiac electrophysiology study (EPS) typically measures the response of the injured or cardiomyopathic myocardium to PES on specific pharmacological regimens in order to assess the likelihood that the regimen will successfully prevent potentially fatal sustained ventricular tachycardia (VT) or ventricular fibrillation (VF) in the future. Sometimes a series of EPS drug trials must be conducted to enable the cardiologist to select the one regimen for long-term treatment that best prevents or slows the development of VT or VF following PES. Such studies may also be conducted in the presence of a newly-implanted or newly-replaced cardiac pacemaker or AICD.

A specialist in cardiac electrophysiology is known as a cardiac electrophysiologist, or (more commonly) simply an electrophysiologist. Cardiac electrophysiology is considered a subspecialty of cardiology, and in most countries requires two or more years of fellowship training beyond a general cardiology fellowship. Cardiac electrophysiologists are trained to perform interventional cardiac electrophysiology studies (EPS) as well as surgical device implantations.

Cardiac electrophysiology is a relatively young subdiscipline of cardiology and internal medicine. It was developed during the mid-1970's jointly by Mark E. Josephson, M.D., of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, now of Beth Israel-Deaconess Hospital at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and Hein J. J. Wellens, M.D., of the Academic Hospital in Maastricht, The Netherlands.