National Registry on Cardiac Electrophysiology 2007 and 2008

Clinical electrophysiology remains one of the most dynamic areas of cardiology, with continuing developments in equipping centers with more modern mapping and navigation systems. This has enabled an increase in the number and variety of interventions, resulting in significant improvements in results of therapeutic ablation of arrhythmias and prevention of sudden cardiac death. In this phase of transition towards implementation of a computerized national registry with nationwide data transmitted via the internet, publication of the registry in its previous form, although requiring more work, still seems justified, in order to appraise and disseminate qualitative and quantitative developments in this activity and enable comparisons with what is being done internationally, assess the centers' training capacity and inform national and European health authorities of the activities and real needs in this sector. The authors analyze the number and type of procedures performed during 2007 and 2008 based on a survey sent to centers performing diagnostic and interventional electrophysiology (16 centers in 2007 and 2008) and/or implanting cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) (19 centers in 2007 and 21 in 2008). Compared to 2006, one more center began interventional electrophysiology in 2007 and two centers began implanting ICDs in 2008. In the years under review, 2060 electrophysiological studies were performed in 2007 and 2007 were performed in 2008, of which 74 and 79.5% respectively were followed by therapeutic ablation, making totals of 1523 and 1596 ablations (increases of 10.7 and 4.6% from previous years). Atrioventricular nodal reentrant tachycardia was the main indication for ablation (28.4 and 28.7%), followed by accessory pathways (26.8 and 25.4%), atrial flutter (20.8 and 19.7%), atrial fibrillation (13.9 and 14.6%), ventricular tachycardia (4.7 and 5.1%), atrial tachycardia (2.8 and 2.6%) and atrioventricular junction ablation (2.7 and 3.9%). Regarding ICDs, a total of 890 devices were implanted in 2007 and 1040 devices in 2008, of which 63 and 75 respectively were battery replacements and 827 and 965 were first implantations, with the following distribution: single chamber--53.7% in 2007 and 61.4% in 2008; dual chamber--13.8 and 8.4% respectively in 2007 and 2008; resynchronization systems with ICD--32.5% in 2007 and 30.2% in 2008. The figures for first implantations show growth of 18.5% between 2006 and 2007 and 14.3% between 2007 and 2008. First implantations increased from 67.4 devices per million population in 2006 to 82.7 in 2007 and 96.5 in 2008.