Atrial and Ventricular Electrocardiographic Dromotropic Disturbances in Down Syndrome Patients with Structurally Normal Heart: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background: we designed a cross-sectional study to determine electrocardiographic disorders in down syndrome patients with congenitally normal hearts in a bid to predict fatal cardiac arrhythmia in the future. materials and methods: we investigated 60 children with ds without congenital abnormal hearts. sixty healthy juveniles were also included in the study as a control group. physical examination, electrocardiography, and echocardiography were performed in all subjects. corrected qt interval (qtc) was measured according to bazett’s formula. results: patients with ds consisted of 32 males (53.33%), and 28 females (46.66%), aged 6–13 (9.21 ± 6.24) years old. healthy subjects comprised 31 males (51.66%), and 29 females (48.33%) with a mean age of 9.15 ± 5.01. the two groups were significantly different in terms of heart rate (p=0.006), maximum p-wave duration (p=0.001), and p-wave dispersion (pwd, p=0.0001). there was no statistically significant difference regarding minimum p-wave duration (p=0.176). the patients with ds had a greater maximum qtc interval, qt dispersion, and corrected qt interval dispersion (qtc-d) than the healthy control subjects (p=0.001). however, there was no difference in maximum qt interval and minimum qtc interval between the two groups (p=0.67 and p=0.553, respectively). a positive correlation was found between age, heart rate, and all electrocardiographic variables. conclusion: all ds patients, even in the absence of concomitant congenital heart disease should be followed up carefully by electrocardiography, looking for increased pwd and qtc-d to detect predisposed cases to arrhythmia.