Abstract
Dr Valhaus, praising and also criticizing our paper on ‘Do we need pacemakers resistant to magnetic resonance imaging?’1 speculates that ‘cardiac arrest caused by sinus arrest in a setting of possible MRI inhibition of the pacemaker (PM) could also be the trigger leading to ventricular fibrillation (VF) on the basis of cardiac hypoxia’. This involves two assumptions: there must be a prolonged sinus node recovery time in a non-PM-dependent patient and simultaneously the PM must be inhibited by the MRI device. All stored electrograms in ICDs2,3 demonstrate that MRI noise is continuous and, therefore, makes the devices switch to ‘interference mode’, which is asynchronous pacing in PMs and inhibition in ICDs. Thus, the deceased PM patients listed in our paper were certainly paced asynchronously either by interference mode or by magnet mode. 1. The paper by Vahlhaus …
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