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ARRHYTHMIA
Arrhythmia treatments regulate disrupted heartbeats

When a child’s heart rate is disturbed — whether it is irregular, racing or abnormally slow — it usually is due to an arrhythmia. An arrhythmia is a condition in which the heart’s electrical conduction system is disrupted. 

Normally, the heart's chambers — the atria and the ventricles — coordinate contractions. When there are problems in the conduction system, the electrical impulses that initiate contractions are abnormal, causing an arrhythmia.

Rewiring the heart
Children who have heart surgery for another condition often develop an arrhythmia later. Scarring from the first surgery can cause a disturbance because it doesn’t allow conduction through the heart’s electrical system. 

Arrhythmias usually are not dangerous unless they cause a severe decrease in the heart’s pumping function. If this occurs for more than a few seconds, blood circulation is stopped, causing organ damage within minutes.

Arrhythmias often are treated with medication — to slow or speed the heart rate — and radiofrequency catheter ablation. The ablation procedure destroys the extra wire’s ability to conduct electricity, therefore correcting the rhythm disturbance. 

Implantable defibrillators monitor abnormal heart rhythms and deliver a shock to re-establish the normal rhythm. 

Pacing the heart
An abnormally slow heart rate is called bradycardia, another type of arrhythmia. Pacemakers treat patients whose heart rates are too slow for even daily activities by looking for the heart’s own activity. When the pacemaker does not detect the heart rate, it will regulate the pace. 

The pacemaker lab in Texas Children's Heart Center monitors pacemaker patients throughout the country and beyond some patients have been as far away as Honduras. In 2002, the lab evaluated more than 1,000 pacemaker patients and implanted 343 pacemakers. 

The lab is able to monitor its patients using the telephone (called transtelephonic monitoring). With a pacemaker transmitter between the pacemaker and the mouthpiece of the telephone, a patient transmits an electrocardiogram (ECG, sometimes referred to as an EKG) to the lab.

Setting standards
Cardiologists at Texas Children’s Heart Center read more than 11,100 ECGs in 2002. Texas Children’s Heart Center is one of the largest centers for arrhythmia diagnosis and treatment in the nation. 

Innovation, research and the sheer volume of cases have made Texas Children’s Heart Center one of the leading centers for implanting and monitoring pacemakers and defibrillation devices.