2022 Volume 71 Issue 2 Pages 318-323
Background: Pericardial effusion (PE) is one of the most frequent complications of catheter ablation (CA). Furthermore, there are not many institutions that confirm PE immediately before CA. We thus assessed the impact of PE confirmation immediately before CA. Subjects and Methods: We enrolled a total of 327 patients (mean age, 64.0 ± 13.4 years; 70.3% male) who underwent CA between April 2019 and September 2019. We confirmed PE immediately before and after CA by transthoracic echocardiography. There were 48 patients who were found to have PE after CA, and they were divided into two groups: no change in PE before and after CA (no-change group), and PE occurred after CA (PE group). We evaluated the number of cardiac events using the chi-square independence test. Results: There were 24 patients in each group. Three patients experienced cardiac events in the no-change group and 10 in the PE group. In addition, the number of cardiac events was significantly larger in the PE group than in the no-change group (p < 0.05). Conclusions: Cardiac tamponade can be caused by a small amount of PE. However, it is difficult to determine whether the PE was caused by CA. Therefore, we suggested that it is important and useful to check for PE immediately before CA to determine whether PE is caused by CA.
