| pubmed-article:2657487 | pubmed:abstractText | In 2001, 22% of the Italian population will be over 60 and the morbidity/mortality rate due to cardiovascular disease is extremely high in this age group. However reports in the literature disagree on the incidence of arrhythmias. The present study assesses the incidence of hyper and hypokinetic arrhythmias in a group of "over-sixties" with no clinical signs of cardiovascular and/or systemic disease. Twenty-four hour Holter monitoring was performed on 103 patients (49 male, 54 female) after clinical examination anamnesis, ECG and chest X-rays had shown a normal picture. There was a wide variation in total heart beats and maximum-minimum cardiac frequency but none of these variables appeared related to age. Total heart beat and minimum cardiac frequency figures were significantly higher among the bedridden (p less than 0.01 and p less than 0.05 respectively). There were no supraventricular arrhythmias in 63% of the patients and only simple forms were encountered in the 38 patients presenting such arrhythmias. Ventricular arrhythmias were absent in 60% of the group, while among the 41 patients presenting these phenomena, as many as 32 presented simple forms, while only 5 were in Lown's class IV and 2 of these due to a single pairing, 1 a single triplet. No significant difference was found in the incidence of supraventricular and ventricular arrhythmias among the 60-69 and 70-79 age groups. There were 3 cases of transitory nocturnal grade I atrioventricular block, but no advanced hypokinetic arrhythmias. The ST-T interval revealed no alterations definitely indicative of ischaemia, despite the presence of alterations in the basal morphology. To sum up, the study revealed a low incidence of supraventricular and ventricular arrhythmias in the elderly population examined and most importantly, the vast majority of those encountered were simple forms. | lld:pubmed |
