The history of clinical Holter Monitoring.

Presented here is a 40-year review of Del Mar Avionics’ Medical Systems Division, highlighting the company’s clinical application teamwork with members of the International Society of Holter and Noninvasive Electrocardiology and other cardiologists worldwide to develop and apply its novel long-term clinical ambulatory heart monitoring instrumentation for reporting and managing abnormal rhythm and conduction conditions of the heart and its cardiovascular system. Sudden death by heart attack on presumed healthy people is a very shocking experience for everyone associated with the victim. Now here was a challenge facing the medical profession in the 20th Century! They saw the need to intensify the search for early warnings of a possible heart attack! They needed to increase cooperation with the pharmaceutical industry to find some new heart-relaxing and seizure-preventing drugs. They needed to offer more support to the research in laboratories associated with hospitals. It was up to cardiologists to increase their effort and lead the way in the effort to reduce the incidence of sudden death by heart attack! This article is a testimonial to the people who developed and applied the noninvasive ambulatory long-term heart monitoring procedure that became known late in the 20th Century as Holter Monitoring, and who used its discoveries of cardiac abnormalities to effectively treat the patient and thereby meet that challenge. In Beverly Hills, California, Cedars-Sinai Hospital and its medical staff rose to the challenge. They established there an animal research laboratory in the late 1950s to invasively explore animal cardiovascular systems and to determine the strength and weakness of a cardiovascular system under various adverse conditions. Cardiolo-