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An Approach to Measure Atrial and Ventricular Heart Rate Variability Using Pacemaker‐Mediated Intracardiac Electrograms

Heart rate variability (HRV) measurements are usually performed from ventricular beat‐to‐beat intervals because of the difficulty to precisely locate the P wave fiducial point in surface ECG recordings. The aim of the study was to describe an approach to determine the atrial and ventricular HRV using pacemaker‐mediated intracardiac electrograms. Twelve patients with the dual chamber pacemaker Logos were included. The atrial and ventricular intracardiac electrograms were transmitted with the high resolution telemetry channel of the pacemaker to an external recorder for 20 minutes while the patients were supine. During the measurements the patients were in sinus rhythm with intrinsic AV conduction. After computer assisted triggering of the atrial and ventricular events, the resultant intervals were used to calculate the standard deviation of all NN intervals (SDNN), the square root of the mean squared differences of successive NN intervals (RMSSD), and the percentage of successive interval differences >50 ms (pNN50). The differences between atrial and ventricular HRV‐Indexes were assessed for each patient with a cut‐off point of 1%. Differences >1% were analyzed in detail. A total of 15,504 heart cycles were analyzed. A manual correction due to false or not triggered atrial or ventricular events was necessary in 0.9%. The overall difference between atrial and ventricular pNN50 was −0.5%±2.1% and differences >1% were observed in 4 patients. The NN50 events occurred in the atrial as well as in the related ventricular interval in 84%. NN50 events occurred only in the atrium in 6% and only in the ventricle in 10%. The mean differences between atrial and ventricular SDNN and RMSSD were 0.4±2.1 ms and −0.1±3.5  ms with intra‐individual differences <1%. The present study described a new method and demonstrated its feasibility to determine atrial as well as ventricular HRV from pacemakermediated intracardiac electrograms. The differences for pNN50 indicate that ventricular HRV did not reflect the changes of sinus node activity in all patients. (PACE 2003; 26:2272–2274)