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Query: UMLS:C0018799 (heart disease)
 34,133 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

The electrophysiological evaluation of syncope of unknown origin yields a diagnosis in approximately 40% of patients. In the presence of structural heart disease ventricular tachycardia is the most common etiology accounting for 20% of cases. Over the past several years head-up tilt table testing with isoproterenol provocation has highlighted the syndrome of neurocardiogenic syncope. This syndrome accounts for an additional 30-40% of patients with syncope. There is compelling evidence that this syndrome involves the Bezold-Jarisch reflex with excessive stimulation of ventricular mechanoreceptors (C-fibers) located predominantly in the inferoposterior portion of the heart. Tilt table testing is now an established tool both for diagnosis of this syndrome and for guiding therapy with beta blockers, disopyramide, theophylline, or alpha-agonists. Tilt table testing combined with invasive electrophysiological testing significantly increases the diagnostic yield in the evaluation of syncope.
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PMID:Advances in syncope: a combined approach utilizing head-up tilt testing and electrophysiologic evaluation. 145 78

Problems of arrhythmogenic sudden death (ASD) in athletes have been re-assessed on the clinicopathological plane, encompassing the emerging, unsolved, question of so-called idiopathic ventricular tachycardia, and its debated diagnostics versus arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia-cardiopathy. Ischemic-infarction ASD from coronary artery pathology in young athletes has been seen to present with atherosclerotic "soft" subintimal plaques, rich in newly formed smooth myocytes, often attended by adventitial mast cell, as suspect microscopic markers of spasm, relevant to reperfusion; these features can be found also in precociously intramural arteries, responsible for ASD. Rare congenital abnormalities of the coronary ostia occasionally underlie ASD, together with the acquired aneurysmic coronaritis of chronic Kawasaki disease. Ischemic ASD can also be due to coronary arteriolopathy attending hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a not uncommon disease in athletes, to be carefully discriminated from training heart hypertrophy. Young South-American sportsmen with Chagas' chronic cardiopathy seem to be at particular risk of ASD. Minor, but specific arrhythmogenic cardiac malformations such as accessory AV pathways have been detected in athletes succumbing to otherwise unexplained ASD, undergone careful post-mortem investigation. The need of more attentive and extended histopathologic control emerges from the hitherto ignored cardiac neuropathological substrates of reflexogenic ASD, which is cogent to problems of ASD in competing athletes. The thorough examination of the cardiac vascular centers in the brain stem, and of the peripheral cardiac innervation, at either abutments of the arc of dive- and/or Bezold-Jarisch cardioinhibitory-vasodepressor reflex, made it possible to suggest novel clinicopathological explanations in controversial cases of athletes' ASD, safeguarding from grave leval misjudgements due to sport's forensic medical mistakes.
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PMID:Structural and non-structural disease underlying high-risk cardiac arrhythmias relevant to sports medicine. 750 Jun 31