coronary angiogram in patients with left anterior hemiblock presenting with chest pain

Left anterior hemiblock is considered by many workers as a normal electrocardiographic variant. Still patients with left anterior hemiblock presenting with chest pain are more likely to have atherosclerortic coronary artery disease. So the significance of left anterior hemiblock in the general population remains controversial. The 12 leads resting surface ECGs of 245 patients presenting with chest pain were retrospectively studied. Those patients underwent cardiac catheterization and selective coronary angiography in the years 1981 to 1984 inclusive at Ain-Shams cardiac catheterization laboratory. Only patients with isolated LAH and those with normal ECGs were selected for this study. The aim of this work is to find out if the former condition represents an early electrocardiographic feature of ischaemic heart disease. It was found that 10 patients showed pathological left axis deviation [LAH] while 30 had a normal frontal plane QRS axis. The relative frequency of LAH among all patients is 4.08%. In conclusion, the presence of LAH in resting ECGs of patients presenting with chest pain seems to be coincidental electrocardiographic finding rather than an influencing sign. However it was found that the left anterior descending coronary artery was significantly diseased in 85.7% of patients with LAH in their ECGs. Such controversy is attributed to the statistical analysis

Electrocardiographic changes associated with oesophagogastro duodenoscopy

The ECG changes associated with oesophagogastro duodenoscopy of 140 patients were studied. All patients developed sing us tachycardia, 7.85% of subjects developed premature beats and 60% of subjects developed T-wave changes in form of flatness or inversion after endoscopy