Arrhythmias in Patients with Congenital Heart Disease: An Ongoing Morbidity.

With the aging of congenital heart disease (CHD) patients, the burden of arrhythmias is expanding. Atrial arrhythmias, especially intra-atrial reentrant tachycardia and atrial fibrillation, are the most prevalent forms of arrhythmia. Managing comorbidities, such as obesity, using pharmacotherapy, including antiarrhythmics and anticoagulants, and ablation therapy has become the cornerstone of arrhythmia management. Ventricular tachycardias are also not rare; however, except for tetralogy of Fallot patients, recommendations for the use of implantable cardioverter defibrillators for primary prevention in other CHD patients are still not well established. Patients with CHD might also present with atrioventricular blockages because of their anatomy or following a surgical procedure. The scope of this article is to review the current knowledge and discuss the future directions regarding arrhythmia management in CHD patients.

The value of myocardial strain imaging in the evaluation of patients with repaired Tetralogy of Fallot: a review of the literature.

Tetralogy of Fallot (ToF) is considered to be the most common, complex, cyanotic congenital heart disease (CHD) representing 7-10% of all congenital heart defects, whereas the patients with ToF are the most frequently operated in their early infancy or childhood. Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) consists a valuable imaging technique for the diagnosis and serial follow-up of CHD patients. Furthermore, in recent years, advanced echocardiography imaging techniques have come to the fore, aiming to achieve a complete and more accurate evaluation of cardiac function using speckle tracking imaging modalities. We conducted a review of the literature in order to assess the myocardial deformation of patients with repaired ToF (rToF) using echocardiographic and CMR parameters. Patients with rToF have impaired myocardial strain parameters, that are well standardized either with the use of speckle tracking echocardiography or with the use of CMR imaging. Subclinical left ventricular dysfunction (low GLS) and myocardial dyssynchrony are commonly identified in rToF patients. Impaired left atrium (LA) and right atrium (RA) mechanics are, also, a common finding in this study population, but the studies using atrial strain are a lot fewer than those with LV and RV strain. No studies using myocardial work were identified in the literature, as far as rToF patients are concerned, which makes it an ideal field for further investigation.