Combining Antiarrhythmic Drugs and Implantable Devices Therapy: Benefits and Outcome

Abstract

At least 50% of patients who received an ICD have been treated with antiarrhythmic drugs (AAD). The potential indications for combining antiarrhythmic drugs and ICD are generally the following: reduction of the number of episodes of ventricular tachycardia or ventricular fibrillation and therefore of the number of shocks, improving patient's quality of life and extending the battery life of the ICD, prevention of supraventricular arrhythmias and/or control of their rate, lengthening of the tachycardia cycle length to allow ventricular tachycardia conversion by antitachycardia pacing and reduction of the number of episodes of syncope.

Although previous papers reported conflicting results about pharmacologic therapy in reducing the frequency of iCD shocks, some recent randomized prospective studies showed the efficacy of pharmacologic therapy in reducing the frequency of ICD shocks.

The use of antiarrhythmic drugs can have also adverse effect: an increase in the defibrillation threshold, an increase in the pacing threshold and an increase in the VT cycle length leading to detection failure. We have also to consider that some advantages derived from antiarrhythmic drugs can be reached by the new devices with atrial sensing and pacing and/or the possibility of atrial defibrillation or by using catheter ablation as adjunctive therapy to ICD.

For these reasons, the concomitant use of antiarrhythmic drugs and ICD should be evaluated in each patient in relation to specific clinical and electrophysiologic features including: the frequency, the rate and the clinical presentation of the ventricular arrhythmia, the effect of the selected drug on the defibrillation threshold, the defibrillation threshold at the implant, the effect of the selected drug on the ventricular function and the likelihood of proarrhythmic events.