A study of the risk factors of various arrhythmias in patients with coronary heart disease
Background: Complications like arrhythmias, cardiac failure, cerebrovascular and mechanical complications. Among these complications, arrhythmias are the most common complication of acute myocardial infarction. The objective of this study was to study the risk factors of various arrhythmias in patients with coronary heart disease.Methods: Present study was a hospital based cross sectional study conducted at department of General Medicine of a tertiary care hospital for a period of two years among 102 patients. Detailed history, clinical examination, investigation was done. All patients were followed for one year to assess the outcome among them. All data was entered in the Microsoft Excel worksheet and analyzed using proportions.Results: Arrhythmias were more common with low ejection fraction (72.73%). The overall mortality was 7.84%. Ventricular fibrillation was seen in 50% of the patients who did not receive thrombolytic therapy. First-degree AV block and second-degree AV block were present in 6.25% and 7.50% respectively and did not affect the mortality while complete heart block was present in 8.75% and mortality rate of 28.57% with right ventricular involvement. Risk factors like smoking, alcohol, hypertension, diabetes mellitus and obesity had higher incidence of arrhythmias but was not found to have any statistical significance (p >0.05). However, patients having multiple risk factors strongly associated with the high mortality in statistically significant manner (p value 0.0006).Conclusions: Patients with risk factors like smoking, alcohol, hypertension, diabetes mellitus and obesity had higher incidence of arrhythmias. Multiple risk factors increase the incidence of both arrhythmias and mortality (67% mortality with 4 risk factors and 75% mortality with 5 risk factors).