Maternal arrhythmias of normal labor and delivery.

Labor and delivery are associated with significant hemodynamic changes, as well as pain and anxiety, all of which could be fertile ground for arrhythmias. In order to establish whether cardiac arrhythmias occur more frequently during labor and delivery in healthy parturients and whether it clinically affects the mother or the newborn, 100 pregnant women admitted for delivery had Holter monitoring before, during, and up to 1 h postpartum. Our results show that, excluding sinus rhythm variations, only a slight majority of the study subjects had arrhythmia at all, while only 2% had more complex arrhythmias, none of which required any therapeutic intervention.

Postprandial angina pectoris: clinical and angiographic correlations.

Objectives: This study was designed to determine the severity of coronary artery disease in patients with postprandial angina pectoris.

Background: Postprandial angina is a manifestation of coronary artery disease. Although seen in clinical practice, very little has been published about the syndrome, and no anatomic correlations have been described.