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Non‐sustained ventricular tachycardia as a predictor of sudden cardiac death in patients with left ventricular dysfunction: A meta‐analysis
Author(s) -
Sousa Marcos R.,
Morillo Carlos A.,
Rabelo Fábio T.,
Filho Antônio M. Nogueira,
Ribeiro Antonio L.P.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
european journal of heart failure
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 5.149
H-Index - 133
eISSN - 1879-0844
pISSN - 1388-9842
DOI - 10.1016/j.ejheart.2008.07.002
Subject(s) - medicine , cardiology , ventricular tachycardia , ejection fraction , heart failure , receiver operating characteristic , funnel plot , sudden cardiac death , ambulatory , dilated cardiomyopathy , area under the curve , meta analysis , publication bias
Abstract Background: Identifying patients at risk of sudden cardiac death (SCD) remains a challenge. Aim: To evaluate the performance of non‐sustained ventricular tachycardia (NSVT) from 24 hour ambulatory electrocardiography as a predictor of SCD in patients with heart failure or non‐ischaemic dilated cardiomyopathy with left ventricular systolic dysfunction (LVSD). Methods and results: Study search and selection were performed by independent reviewers using a validated strategy. Eleven prognostic studies with > 100 patients with good quality data and multivariate analysis of predictors of SCD were included. Publication bias was evaluated by funnel plot with Kendall's tau b test. A summary ROC (sROC) curve was built to evaluate predictive performance of NSVT. There was threshold effect (Spearman's correlation between sensitivity and specificity=−0.818, p <0.01) which indicates that combining sensitivity and specificity was not appropriate. The area of 0.68±0.02 under the sROC curve indicates a statistically significant contribution of NSVT in the prediction of SCD. The true negative rate varied from 89 to 97%. Multivariate analysis and meta‐regression suggested that the contribution of NSVT to risk stratification is independent of ejection fraction. Conclusions: Absence of NSVT indicated a low probability of SCD in patients with LVSD. A risk score including NSVT should be evaluated in prospective studies.