Auricular Flutter With Congenital Heart Disease

With the rapidly increasing use of the electrocardiograph in clinical medicine, the recognition of auricular flutter is no longer a rarity. During the last few years, numerous articles have appeared in the literature dealing with the clinical features of this abnormal cardiac mechanism. In virtually all of the recorded cases the patients were adults, although Lewis¹reported a case of flutter in a child (age not mentioned), and Koplik²reported the condition in a boy, aged 10 years. Blacher³noted the possibility of the existence of transient auricular flutter while examining a child, aged 8 years, who had diphtheria. We observed a child with congenital heart disease from the age of 2½ to 5 years, who had auricular flutter a month preceding death. The association of these two conditions is extremely rare, and it is unusually interesting in this particular case because of the correlation with the