A sectional retrospective evaluation of the results of 24-hour holter ECG

Holter monitoring (HM) is widely used in arrhythmic disorders since they may occur briefly and unpredictably throughout the day. The resting electrocardiographic findings give information only about a short period of cardiac rhythm, and accordingly most of the arrhythmias may be skipped. Therefore HM is one of the most important methods in the diagnosis of dysrhythmia. In this study, 1821 Holter monitoring recordings obtained from 1446 cases in Akdeniz University Medical Faculty Pediatric Cardiology Department, from October 2010 to October 2012 were analysed retrospectively. The age of the patients were between 6 days and 56 years and their median age was 11 years. 736 patients were girls and 710 patients were boys. The most common presenting symptoms were chest pain (47.55%), palpitation (41.52%) and syncope/pre-syncope (15.50%). Patients with Thalassemia, congenital heart disease, rheumatic heart disease and symptomatic, asymptomatic and control patients were evaluated separately. Findings at HM were as follows; 41.56% of record was normal. supraventricular extrasystoles (SVE) (32.78%), ventricular extrasystoles (VES) (12.17%), wandering atrial pacemaker (3.59%) and supraventricular tachycardia (3.66%). In the patients with echocardiographic examination, 67 of them had rheumatic heart disease, 359 of them had congenital heart disease and 64 of them had cardiomyopathy. According to the findings at HM, Medical treatment modalities were started in 166 patients and intarcardiac pacemaker implantation was performed for 8 patients. In symptomatic cases, it was difficult to determine cardiac arrhythmia during Holter Monitoring since no symptom was observed. Nevertheless, we consider that the prognostic significance of Holter monitoring is high in the cases who are suspicious about dysrhythmia