The effect of bronchial asthma on the heart, with special reference to the spatial vectorcardiogram

Abstract

OES long-standing bronchial asthma have an effect on the heart? Various investigators have arrived at diametrically opposite conclusions in answering this question. The present study, which has special reference to spatial vectorcardiography in bronchial asthma, is undertaken because this technique, a comparatively new tool in cardiac diagnosis, offers information which reflects alterations in the myocardium. HISTORICAL REVIEW In 1927 Kahn1 in studying fifty cases of bronchial asthma, observed ten instances of right ventricular preponderance, twenty-one cases of left ventricular preponderance, and nineteen normal electrocardiograms. There was no evidence of myocardial involvement. Alexander and associates* found, in the fift,y patients they studied, that bronchial asthma produced no changes indicative of myocardial damage. Unger,3 in 1932, concluded from an electrocardiographic study of seventy-four cases of bronchial asthma that there was evidence of ‘ ‘ myocardial damage” in his patients. It should be noted, however, that in this report the only basis for such a dignosis is the presence of mild conduction disturbances and of right ventricular preponderance. However, one of us* found in the same year no clinical or electrocardiographic evidence of permanent cardiac damage in fifty cases of long-standing bronchial asthma. Minor transitory ST interval and T wave alterations occurred during the acute, severe paroxysms in some of these patients. It was thought that these resulted from the associated transient asphyxia. Similar transient electrocardiographic abnormalities are reported in serum sickness and other types of acute allergic