background prolonged intensive care unit (icu) and hospital stay after cardiac surgery is vitally important and is influenced by both intraoperative and postoperative factors. objectives this randomized clinical trial study was designed to assess whether vitamin c supplementation could reduce the length of icu and hospital stay in post-cardiac surgery patients. patients and methods two hundred ...

the aim of this study is to evaluate how far lempel-ziv complexity (lzc) of the binary symbolic sequences resulting from static or dynamic transformation (partitioning first-order difference) of the short-term electrocardiogram (ecg) signals (only 2 seconds duration) has the  potential in discriminating normal and ventricular tachycardia/ventricular fibrillation (vt/vf) subjects. the statistica...

background: atrial fibrillation (af) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia and an independent risk factor for stroke among the elderly. a role for inflammation in the atrial remodeling as well as development and recurrence of af is known. objective: to compare il-17a between patients with different types of af and healthy individuals. methods: il-17a was measured in sera of 112 patients and 107...

In cardiac fibrillation, disorganized waves of electrical activity meander through the heart, and coherent contractile function is lost. We studied fibrillation in three stationary forms: in human chronic atrial fibrillation, in a stabilized form of canine ventricular fibrillation, and in fibrillation-like activity in thin sheets of canine and human ventricular tissue in vitro. We also created ...

Echocardiographic Findings That May Help Identify Occult Intermittent Atrial Fibrillation in Hypertensive Patients at Risk for a Second (or First) Ischemic Stroke To the Editor: In their review, Liao et al1 found that Holter or event monitoring of patients after ischemic stroke identified 5% to 7% with intermittent atrial fibrillation not present on the admission ECG. They suggest that such mon...

Background: P wave dispersion (PWD) is defined as the difference between the maximum P wave duration (Pmax) and the minimum P wave duration (Pmin) in 12-leads of the surface electrocardiography. The aim of this study was to evaluate the values of PWD during atrial fibrillation (AF) after acute myocardial infarction (AMI). Methods: We prospectively evaluated atrial rhythms of 350 patients (251 m...

Electrophysiologic studies were performed in 32 patients with angiographically documented coronary artery disease (CAD). Group I was composed of ten patients (31%) with severe stenosis (greater than or equal to 75%) proximal to the origin of the sinus node artery (SNA); group II was composed of five patients (16%) with moderate (50--75%) proximal stenosis; and group III was composed of 17 patie...

Three patients with paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia (PSVT) had discontinuous ventriculo-artrial conduction curves (V1-V2, A1-A2), suggesting dual A-V nodal pathways. Ventricular echoes occurred simultaneously with sudden increase of V-A interval. These echoes were characterized by retrograde P waves occurring in front of QRS, suggesting utilization of a slow pathway for retrograde condu...

Abbreviations: ACUTE 5 Assessment of Cardioversion Using Transesophageal Echocardiography; AF 5 atrial fibrillation; AFASAK 5 Atrial Fibrillation Aspirin and Anticoagulation; AFI 5 Atrial Fibrillation Investigators; BAATAF 5 Boston Area Anticoagulation Trial for Atrial Fibrillation; CAFA 5 Canadian Atrial Fibrillation Anticoagulation; CI 5 confidence interval; DC 5 direct current; EAFT 5 Europe...