Initiation and management of polymorphic ventricular tachycardia: history gone full circle

This editorial refers to ‘Polymorphic ventricular tachycardia, ischaemic ventricular fibrillation, and torsade de pointes: importance of the QT and the coupling interval in the differential diagnosis’, by R. Rosso et al., doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehab138. I do not imagine that electrocardiography is likely to find any very extensive use in the hospital. It can at most be of rare and occasional use to afford a record of some rare anomaly of cardiac action. Augustus Desiré Waller (1856–1922) In the current era of molecular ‘multiomic’ approaches, new and clinically important observations from a simple surface electrocardiogram are both refreshing and inspiring to the practising cardiologist. Indeed, they stand in contradiction to arguably one of the biggest understatements in cardiology by Waller, who recorded the first human electrocardiogram. In this issue of the European Heart Journal, Rosso and colleagues present new data to accurately distinguish several subtypes of polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (VT), which...