A simple ECG score could help physicians estimate infarct size in patients with prior MI, according to work published Jan. 24 in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) is the gold standard for visualizing and quantifying a myocardial infarction in 2020, Daniel C. Lee, MD, MS of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and colleagues wrote in JAHA, and the modality has proven useful in predicting a slew of risky future CV events, including recurrent MI, arrhythmias, heart failure, revascularization and death. But MR imaging is expensive, and electrocardiography—the industry’s first-line diagnostic test for patients with suspected ischemic heart disease—is more widely available in the U.S.
Lee et al. explained that several ECG abnormalities have been noted in heart attack survivors, including Q waves (QW), fragmented QRS (FQRS) and T wave inversions (TWI). Right now such abnormalities are considered dichotomous markers for the presence or absence of infarction, but their relationship to infarct size hasn’t been studied.
