Congestive Heart Failure and Ventricular Arrhythmias

Congestive heart failure (CHF) is a rather freq uent disease especially in the older population. This disease has a very grave prognosis and death usually comes suddenly. Despite the ratio of sudden death approaches 80% in groups with relatively well functional capacity sudden death rate drops to 5 % in end-stage patient groups. Nevertheless, the cause of sudden death shifts from vent ri cula r tachycardia/ fibrill a tion to bradyarrhythmias when illness becomes grave. Many comprehensible reasons, such as myocardial fibrosis, stretch, increased sympathetic drive, el ectrolyte imbalance, may easily cause ventricular arrhythmia in fa iling hearts. Holter monitoring, signal averaged e lectroca rd iogram, prog rammed ventric ular stimulation procedures are used to find out the population under ri sk. Randemised trials have been designed to seek the most advantageous drug in terrns of reducing the arrhythmic and total mortality. Unfortunately, even amiodarone fa iled to show any impressive benefit to reduce deaths in population at ri sk. Implantable cardioverter defıbrillator devices (ICD) seem to be very promising to reverse the evi) course .