Epidemiology of Arrhythmias in Children

• Main Author: R Prem Sekar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2008-05-01
• Series: Indian Pacing and Electrophysiology Journal
• Subjects: epidemiology; arrhythmias; children
• Online Access: http://www.ipej.org/0802S/sekar.htm

Unlike the adult population, arrhythmias occur less commonly in childhood. Only 5% of the emergency hospital admissions in the paediatric population is attributed to symptomatic arrhythmias. Majority of these tend to be accessory pathway mediated supraventricular tachyarrhythmias such as Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome, permanent junctional reciprocating tachycardia (PJRT) and Mahaim tachycardia. The non accessory pathway mediated supraventricular tachyarrhythmias commonly seen in children are junctional ectopic tachycardia (JET) and automatic ectopic atrial tachycardia (AET) and occur mostly in the post operative period after intracardiac repair for a structural heart defect. Ventricular tachycardia (VT) although uncommon, occurs in the paediatric age group in association with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), long QT syndrome (LQTS) and Brugada syndrome. Occasionally, VT can also present symptomatically as incessant idiopathic infant ventricular tachycardia, right ventricular outflow tract tachycardia, benign VT, catecholaminic VT, idiopathic left ventricular tachycardia and in post cardiac surgical patients.