How to prevent arrhythmia recurrences?

Medical experts from the United States, Germany, Poland and Russia claim that the renal denervation technique, a minimally invasive intervention, helps to significantly reduce the frequency of arrhythmia recurrences and correct background increases in blood pressure.

Arrhythmia can be attributed to the most common cardiac pathologies. The disease is characterized by a disturbance in the frequency and rhythm of heartbeats, agitation disorder and muscle contraction. In many patients, the rhythm disturbance is accompanied by an increase in blood pressure, which further aggravates the problem. One of the most dangerous forms of arrhythmia is atrial fibrillation. We are talking about a special type of supraventricular tachyarrhythmia, occurring with chaotic electrical activity of the atria at a pulse frequency of 350-700 per minute. Such a frequency makes it impossible to coordinate contractions. It is very important not only to treat the pathology, but also to prevent its further relapses, each of which poses a serious danger to the patient.

One of the methods of such prevention can be called the one discovered by scientists representing the National Medical Research Center and the Federal Center for Cardiovascular Surgery. Doctors launched a multicenter randomized clinical project, during which they determined the positive preventive effect of renal denervation. The method of destruction of nerves localized in the walls of the renal arteries is performed simultaneously with the standard intervention, which is a catheter radiofrequency isolation of the terminal sections of the pulmonary venous vessels. This reduces the likelihood of recurrence of arrhythmia and favors the normalization of blood pressure indicators.

During the project work, the scientists studied the case histories of more than 300 patients suffering from atrial fibrillation accompanied by high blood pressure. For half of them, catheter ablation was used, and for the other half, in addition to standard procedures, the renal denervation method was used. As a result, the second group of patients showed better results: during the year after the end of treatment, the percentage of absence of arrhythmia relapses in these patients was higher than in the first group. In addition, their blood pressure was completely normalized.

Previously, scientists had already conducted a similar study, although it was much smaller in scale: it involved only 27 patients suffering from atrial fibrillation against the background of high blood pressure. The results then had much in common with the current results. It turns out that during the second study, specialists only confirmed the information that existed earlier. Perhaps the next step will be the introduction of the new method into clinical practice.

The material was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association