Out-of-body experience and auditory and visual hallucinations in a patient with cardiogenic syncope: Crucial role of cardiac event recorder in establishing the diagnosis.

Out-of-body experience (OBE) and visual and auditory hallucinations can occur in a variety of medical conditions. We describe a 48-year-old male patient who experienced several paroxysmal events with different combinations of the aforementioned symptoms that could finally be attributed to cardiogenic syncope after subcutaneous implantation of an event recorder and that ceased after implantation of a cardiac pacemaker. Hallucinations and OBE are well-known phenomena in syncope.

Mitral regurgitation--evaluation of a multidimensional echocardiographic grading system. A study on 177 patients with chronic primary and secondary mitral regurgitation.

Introduction: In grading mitral regurgitation (MR) magnetic resonance imaging is the gold standard but 2D echo is mostly used in clinical practice. However, each single echo parameter is prone to confounding influences. With regard to chronic primary and secondary MR the purpose of this study was to compare a new multi-dimensional echo-based grading system with an independent pre-operatively used invasive standard.