Ventricular fibrillation markers on admission to the hospital for acute mcardial infarction

Abstract

Primary ventricular fibrillation (VF) is an early complication of acute myocardial infarction (AMI), which was recently associated with high in-hospital mortality. 1 The usefulness of preventive antiarrhythmic drugs in patients with symptoms of acute coronary ischemia has been addressed in different studies, 2,3 but less attention has been given to the identification of AMI patients with a high risk for VF. Admission data for predicting VF in AMI have been assessed by Flugelman et al 4–5 and Molstad 6 using multiple logistic regression formulas. In the first study, however, ventricular tachycardia was included as the end point for analysis, and no distinction was made between primary and secondary VF, whereas in the second study, only variables of doubtful value in clinical practice were considered. We investigated the usefulness of routine clinical, electrocardiographic and laboratory parameters for predicting the development of VF in patients with AMI in Killip's functional class I and II.