Will Ablation Help My Ventricular Tachycardia?

— -- Question: Will ablation help my ventricular tachycardia?

Answer :You know that is an interesting question, and really over the last years we've seen more and more patients coming requiring ablations for ventricular tachycardia. Patients that have a structurally normally heart, patients that have a healthy heart muscle, normally will require an ablation procedure, and we are successful in about 95 percent of the cases to eliminate the ventricular tachycardia, and the patients do not need any further treatment after that.

In the other kind of ventricular tachycardia, these are the patients that have had heart attacks, ablation strategies or ablation of the heart muscles also frequently necessary. Those patients normally get a defibrillator first, because an ablation there can not guarantee that those patients survive well enough. But after a patient has gotten a defibrillator they still may have additional ventricular tachycardia. And in those cases, because this ventricular tachycardia will lead to shocks from the defibrillator, something more is required.

The first strategy would be that these patients are given medications, but often they have a lot of side effects or then they fail in the long run, and then ablation procedures is a very good tool to go ahead and eliminate these reason for frequent shocks. And the patients are then doing very well for years to come afterwards.