Implantable cardioverter defibrillators for the prevention of sudden cardiac death: technical aspects and future perspectives. What a practitioner needs to know?

Currently, the prevention of sudden cardiac death (SCD) is an urgent issue as never, i.e., more than a half of patients with cardiovascular disorders die suddenly, one third of patients are young and middle-aged adults. The primary preventive strategy of SCD is an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) due to the lack of highly effective and, more important, safe antiarrhythmics. Forty years after the first ICD insertion, SCD is still the cause of more than 5 million of deaths annually worldwide. Therefore, a real need for ICD is significantly higher than the number of insertions. Meanwhile, primary physicians are not aware of this preventive tool. This paper reviews current approaches to ICD use for the primary and secondary prevention of SCD, types of ICDs, selection of electrode insertion sites, relevant aspects of ICD programming to detect and addresses arrhythmias by antitachycardial pacing or shock discharge, standards for outpatient follow-up after ICD insertion, distant monitoring and telemetry, and future perspectives of ICD insertion. KEYWORDS: sudden cardiac death, implantable cardioverter defibrillator, distant monitoring, perspectives. FOR CITATION: Talibullin I.V., Lebedeva N.B., Parfenov P.G., Mamchur S.E. Implantable cardioverter defibrillators for the prevention of sudden cardiac death: technical aspects and future perspectives. What a practitioner needs to know? Russian Medical Inquiry. 2022;6(1):21– 25 (in Russ.). DOI: 10.32364/2587-6821-2022-6-1-21-25.