Do Defibrillators Help For My Newly Diagnosed Ventricular Tachycardia?

Dr. Dickfeld answers the question: 'Defibrillators For Ventricular Tachycardia?'

ByTimm Dickfeld, M.D., Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Medicine, Div. of Cardiology, Univ. of Maryland School of Medicine
November 20, 2008, 12:42 PM

— -- Question: Do defibrillators help for my newly diagnosed ventricular tachycardia?

Answer :As we talked a little bit before, patients that are young and have a structurally normal heart, a healthy heart -- defibrillators are normally not a good treatment strategy and one would rather use ablations.

However, the latter part of the populations that have ventricular tachycardia have these because they had a previous heart attack and they have a scar inside the heart.

And we now have more than one or two decades of experience showing that in those patients defibrillators indeed help a lot and prolong life for those patients. So, in patients that have an abnormal heart muscle and that have ventricular tachycardia, normally defibrillators are the main treatment strategy.

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