About arrhythmia
Children's arrhythmia is quite wide spread – it s third for frequency after the arterial hypertension and heart-deceases, and often it is not the predominant cardiological diagnosis. Children's arrhythmia is often revealed accidentally because children, unlike adults, don't complain even in case of serious defects of heart rhythm, because they don't feel these defects.
The main sequences of arrhythmia in babyhood may be:
- Apnoea
- Occasional blanching and occasional blue color of skin
- Causeless worry
- Food refusal, hypostenic suckle, bad body weight gain
- Bad sleep, frequent wakening, night crying.
For an aged child symptoms of arrhythmia are following:
- Faintings
- Bad tolerance for physical exercise
- Strong fatigability
- Sense of abnormalities of heart rhythm.
First time Long QT syndrome was described in the middle of last century in Norway. There was a family with six deaf-mute children, who suffered faintings, and suddenly four of them died in the age of 4, 5 and 9 years (correspondingly). Their watching doctors A.Jervell and F.Ladge-Nielsen accurately made the post-mortem research but they didn't find any structural or organic damage of hearts. Antemortem electrocardiograms of all the died children showed distinct prolonged QT interval. Further in 1963 Italian and Irish pediatricians C.Romano and O.Ward described independently of each other the same forms of Long QT syndrome this time without deafness, but with the same signs of fainting and inherited sudden death.
The QT interval is responsible for stability of the electrical field of heart. Whether its prolongation or its shortening may lead to developing of dangerous heart's arrhythmia. Regardless of causes of QT prolongation there is always presented the high risk of tachycardia progress and of sudden death in all the cases.
