Medical and Surgical Treatment of the Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome

Few chapters of electrocardiography have made such rapid progress in the last decade as the Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome. The introduction of new techniques (I, 2), or of older ones, such as electric stimulation of the heart, made safe for clinical-physiological investigations (3, 4), is responsible for this break­ through and illustrates Carl Ludwig's dictum: Die Methode ist alles. A relatively simple hypothesis appears to be adequate for an understanding of many morphologi­ cal ECG aspects of this syndrome, the genesis of arrhythmias, and the influence of drugs on their causative mechanisms. What follows is a bird's-eye view (5-8).