Heart Disease Health Center

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Your doctor may recommend further tests, including an echocardiogram, to evaluate your heart's function, a stress test or coronary angiogram to determine whether a part of the heart is not getting enough blood, and/or an electrophysiology study. During an electrophysiology (EP) study, electrical currents are sent through a catheter into the heart to try to trigger ventricular tachycardia and record the flow of electricity through the heart. In this way, the EP study can locate specific areas of heart tissue that give rise to abnormal electrical impulses, which may be causing the ventricular tachycardia. This information is used to determine the best treatment.

How is it treated?

If you are having symptoms and are in a sustained tachycardia, it is a medical emergency. You will require immediate treatment. You may need CPR or a shock from an automatic defibrillator (also known as an AED). Paramedics or your doctor may try intravenous medicines or electrical cardioversion to return your heart to a normal rhythm.

To prevent the arrhythmia from recurring, you may need to take antiarrhythmic medicines. But these medicines may have side effects. So instead, doctors often recommend a type of permanent pacemaker, called an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD). This device is placed under the skin in your chest and continuously monitors your heart's rhythm. If ventricular tachycardia occurs, the ICD applies an electrical shock to the heart to restore a normal rhythm. After a normal rhythm is restored, the device goes back to continuous monitoring mode. Sometimes, both medicines and an ICD are needed.

Heart Rate Problems: Should I Get an ICD?

In some cases a procedure called catheter ablation is used to destroy small areas of heart tissue responsible for the arrhythmia. In this procedure, thin, flexible wires are inserted into a blood vessel in the thigh, groin, neck, or elbow and threaded to the heart. Through these wires, heat or freezing cold temperatures can be delivered to the specific heart tissue that is generating abnormal electrical impulses (previously located in the EP study). The heat or freezing cold destroy (ablate) this heart tissue and can stop ventricular tachycardia from happening again.

It is very important that any causes of ventricular tachycardia be identified and treated, if possible. For example, if the ventricular tachycardia results from a medicine, the medicine needs to be stopped.

What precautions should you take?

If you have had an episode of ventricular tachycardia or ventricular fibrillation, your doctor may recommend that you don't drive a car for a few months. This precaution is to make sure you don't have any other episodes that could make driving unsafe.

If you want to lose weight, do not use diets that rely on a liquid-based program or a high-protein regimen. These types of diets can affect the concentrations of electrolytes in your blood. This can, in turn, cause problems with your heart.

When to call a doctor