Sudden cardiac death (SCD) accounts for roughly fifty per cent of all cardiovascular fatalities, with up to fifty per cent is the first indication of heart illness. This article pens down the 10 recommendations from ESC for the prevention of sudden cardiac deaths.
Key takeaways
- Multiple new recommendations were made in this 2022 update to the 2015 ESC guidelines for the care of patients with ventricular arrhythmia and the prevention of sudden cardiac death (SCD).
- These recommendations were made in response to new information on the epidemiology of SCD, genetic cardiomyopathies, multimodality imaging, risk assessment, diagnostic techniques, and therapeutic methods, with significant changes for the management of coronary artery disease, and premature ventricular complex.
- These recommendations strongly suggest ICD implantation in select individuals with arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, myocardial inflammatory disorders, and symptomatic long QT syndrome despite beta-blocker and genotype-specific treatments.
Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD)
The prevalence of SCD rises significantly with age. Ideally, instances suggestive of SCD should be recognised from several sources and sent to the autopsy, which is necessary to eliminate non-cardiac causes of sudden death with reliability (SD). With a relatively low frequency throughout infancy and childhood (1 per 100 000 person-years), the incidence in middle-aged persons is roughly 50 per 100 000 person-years (in the fifth to sixth decades of life).
In the eighth decade of life, the incidence reaches at least 200 per 100,000 person-years annually. Males had greater SCD rates than females at any age, even after adjusting for coronary artery disease risk factors (CAD). The ethnic background seems to have a significant influence as well. SCD is predicted to account for 10–20% of all fatalities in Europe.
