Published in:
01-12-2013 | Invited Commentary
Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Sudden Cardiac Death. Much More Than Another Method to Measure LVEF
Published in:
Current Cardiovascular Imaging Reports
|
Issue 6/2013
Login to get access
Excerpt
Despite all recent advances in the field of cardiology, sudden cardiac death (SCD) still poses a major challenge. Four to five million lives are lost worldwide every year according to an educated guess based on available epidemiological data [
1]. Most events are secondary to the occurrence of a malignant ventricular arrhythmia due to an association of three factors: anatomic substrate, triggering events and an arrhythmic mechanism [
2]. The development of implantable cardio defibrillators (ICDs), efficient devices to terminate life-threating arrhythmias, raised high hopes of curbing the incidence of SCD for the first time, since antiarrhythmic drugs, although effective in reducing events, did not reduce mortality and were shown to negatively impact cardiac function and induce proarrhythmic effects [
3,
4]. …
