Anterior left ventricular aneurysm: factors associated with the development of sustained ventricular tachycardia

Fifty patients with anteroapical left ventricular aneurysm secondary to prior myocardial infarction underwent aneurysmectomy, at which time endocardial sinus rhythm mapping was performed. Forty patients had a history of recurrent sustained monomorphic ventricular tachycardia, and 10 had an aneurysm but no history of spontaneous sustained tachycardia. A comparison of the clinical, angiographic and sinus rhythm endocardial electrographic characteristics of these two groups revealed that the patients without spontaneous ventricular tachycardia had more severe coronary artery disease (2.6 +/- 0.5 versus 1.9 +/- 0.8 coronary arteries having greater than 70% stenosis; p less than 0.03), underwent surgery earlier after infarction (3 +/- 2 versus 46 +/- 53 months; p less than 0.03) and had less extensive wall motion abnormalities on contrast ventriculography (0 of 8 versus 13 of 35 patients assessed had an abnormally contracting ventriculographic segment length greater than 60%; p less than 0.04). During intraoperative programmed electrical stimulation, all 40 patients with and 4 of 10 without a history of spontaneous ventricular tachycardia had inducible tachycardia. The patients with inducible tachycardia had a larger area of endocardium from which abnormal electrograms (duration greater than 70 ms or amplitude less than 0.7 mV) were recorded (62 +/- 17 versus 45 +/- 20% of electrograms; p less than 0.03) as well as fractionated (duration greater than 90 ms, amplitude less than 0.3 mV) electrograms (20 +/- 14 versus 9 +/- 7% of electrograms; p less than 0.04) than did patients without inducible tachycardia, but there were no angiographic differences between groups.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)