Cilostazol increased heart rate with improvement of activity of daily living in an elderly patient with sick sinus syndrome

Abstract

An 86-year-old man had a history of hypertension and had been treated with calcium antagonist but no medications that could reduce heart rate. As a 12-lead electrocardiogram showed sinus bradycardia, complete right bundle branch block and left anterior fascicular hemiblock on his first visit to our hospital on January 1998, he was admitted to our hospital for further examination and treatment. A 24-hour Holter electrocardiogram demonstrated a total number of 74,182 heartbeats per day with pauses (> 2.0 sec) of 187/day. Overdrive atrial pacing study and His bundle electrogram revealed a prolonged corrected sinus node recovery time (5.820msec at a stimulation rate of 130/min) and H-V conduction time (80msec) with normal A-H conduction time, respectively. We diagnosed these abnormalities as sick sinus syndrome (Rubenstein II). His activity of daily living score was 30 points by the Barthel index on the day of admission. Oral administration of orciprenaline sulfate (30 mg/day), a beta-adrenoceptor agonist, was initially chosen rather than implantation of a cardiac pacemaker to increase his heart rate since he did not have any symptoms due to bradycardia and he did not give us an informed consent for the implantation. Orciprenaline sulfate, however, failed to increase total heartbeats (73,079/day). Then, oral cilostazol (100 mg/day), a phosphodiesterase III inhibitor, was administered. After two weeks of the regimen total heart beats were increased (85,642/day) with no pauses. The increase in heart rate resulted in the improvement of his activity of daily living (Barthel index: 55 points). Cilostazol could be the first line medication for elderly patients with bradyarrhythmia in whom implantation of cardiac pacemaker is not absolutely indicated.