[trvasol]

I saw a post in another discussion tonight about a test for long qt syndrome. Does anyone have a link or more info about how to tell if your at risk for long qt?

[jsuter69]

I wish I could help you with that question, I asked my cardio about me maybe having that, I really don't know why I thought I might have that, I don't even know what it is....but for some reason, when I read the word LONG...I associated it with PAUSING...call me silly or stupid, please don't...I was just kidding...but I seriously thought because my heart has pausing that I was at risk for Sudden Cardiac Death, not sure why.....but I thought those 2 "problems" went hand and hand....I actually still really don't know....

[Jeff]

It's not really associated with a pause in heartbeat. In fact, I'm not sure that someone with long qt would ever know it without having someone do an EKG and diagnosing it, or them having severe arrhythmia symptoms like syncope due to Torsades de Pointes or some other ventricular arrhythmia.

I think the main concern with long qt is the heart is taking too long to repolarize. How that works is this - the heart first depolarizes (fancy term for a discharge of electrical current that makes the muscles in the heart to contract), and then it needs to recover and make itself ready to contract again by "recharging" itself (that's not exactly what happens, but it's good enough for this explanation). With long qt, the recharging process take longer than it should. The reason this is bad is if the person also has PVCs, during the extended time the ventricles are taking to recharge, an ectopic focus fires off an electrical charge causing a PVC when most of the heart cells aren't recharged and ready to contract yet. So some of the cells contract, other ones don't, and little or no blood is pushed out of the heart because of the lack of synchronization in the heart cells.

Now that's worst case scenario. WORST CASE. Many people have mild long qt and never have a problem.

And without long qt, PVCs really aren't a threat.

As for the test - Wikipedia has a decent layout of how the risk is scored. Long QT syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hope that helps.

[trvasol]

ok thanks.