Ventricular Tachycardia

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What is Ventricular Tachycardia?

Ventricular tachycardia is a fast heart rate — anything over the normal 100 beats per minute — which starts in the lower chambers of the heart, the ventricles. It causes the ventricles to contract before they have had a chance to completely fill with blood, impairing blood flow to the body.

Ventricular tachycardia occurs in people with underlying heart abnormalities. In those who have had a heart attack, for example, the scar from the heart attack causes the electrical abnormalities that create the tachycardia.

How Serious is Ventricular Tachycardia?

This is a serious disorder and requires prompt treatment. It poses a serious danger in that it may evolve into the more serious ventricular fibrillation. In this life-threatening condition, the ventricles quiver, pumping very little blood out of the heart. Ventricular fibrillation is the primary cause of sudden cardiac death. If normal rhythm is not restored within 3-5 minutes, the heart and brain will be damaged, and the patient will die.

Severe ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation can be converted into normal rhythm with a controlled electrical shock from a defibrillator.

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How is Ventricular Tachycardia Treated?

Regular treatment of ventricular tachycardia includes medications to slow the heart rate. High-risk patients are treated with an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD). This device, which is inserted under the skin of the chest like a pacemaker, senses irregular rhythms and automatically shocks the heart back into normal rhythm.

Catheter ablation is being increasingly used to interrupt the faulty pathways that cause ventricular tachycardia. Until recently, doctors could not pinpoint these tachycardias well enough to ablate them. With new technology, however, they can accurately map most ventricular tachycardias, enabling elimination of the abnormal signals that cause them.