Does endomyocardial biopsy detect structural alterations in patients with the clinical phenotype of Brugada syndrome?
Endomyocardial biopsy reveals underlying structural alterations in patients with Brugada syndrome despite normal noninvasive evaluations, suggesting a histological substrate for the arrhythmias.
Despite an apparently normal heart at noninvasive evaluation, endomyocardial biopsy detected structural alterations in all 18 patients with Brugada syndrome. Mutations in the SCN5A gene, identified in 4 of the 18 patients, may have induced concealed structural abnormalities of myocardiocytes that accounted for paroxysmal arrhythmic manifestations.
Frustaci et al. (Mon,) studied this question.