Frequency of Cardiac Arrhythmias Detection on 24 Hours Holter Monitoring

Abstract

To determine the clinical outcomes and assess the diagnostic yield of Holter monitoring and its potential use in diagnosing and managing abnormal rhythms, along with identifying patterns or trends in the prevalence of different arrhythmias, which could modify and design future research and clinical practice. It was a descriptive cross sectional study carried out at MMC Mardan on around 1000 patients, from June 2017 to December 2022. Three trained Cardiologists having more than 03 years of experience reviewed the 24-hour monitor data through the system. Among these 1000 patients, 31% had at least one arrhythmia detected on 24-hour Holter monitoring. The most common arrhythmias detected were premature ventricular contractions (54%), followed by Atrial fibrillation (18%) and supraventricular tachycardia (15%) while 2.3% had first-degree AV block, 4.5% had second-degree AV block, and 0.8% had third-degree AV block. In conclusion, our study showed that Holter monitoring for 24 hours is a useful tool for detecting a range of cardiac arrhythmias, with premature ventricular contractions being on the top, with some forms of AV block also being detected in a small group of patients, having first-degree AV block being the most common type.