[Shock-wave lithotripsy in choledocholithiasis in a female patient with a cardiac pacemaker].

Background: Extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy is relatively contraindicated in patients with an implanted cardiac pacemaker. Shock waves can damage the pacemaker by mechanical pressure and also by electromagnetic induction. Since the distance between the applicator and the pacemaker is small during biliary lithotripsy, the risk of damaging the pacemaker is greater.

A three-site programmed electrical stimulation protocol in patients with and without ventricular tachyarrhythmias.

Programmed electrical stimulation (PES) of the ventricle plays an important role in diagnosis and in testing the effect of pharmacological and non-pharmacological therapy of ventricular tachyarrhythmias. A stimulation protocol should reliably reproduce clinical ventricular tachyarrhythmia. The authors compared the results of the standard one-site protocol to those of a new test delivering extrastimuli alternately into the right and left ventricle.

Changes in ventricular effective refractory periods after two extrastimuli and ventricular electrical instability.

Using programmed stimulation with one and three extrastimuli delivered in the right ventricular apex, we compared the effective refractory period (ERP) during sinus rhythm (ERP-SR) and during the third extrastimulus (ERP-S3) in patients without ventricular tachycardias (control group, n = 87) and in patients with documented ventricular tachycardia (VT group, n = 76). The protocol was not completed to determine ERP-S3 in one patient in the control group and in 15 patients in the VT group. We observed a significantly greater change (i.

Effect of stretch combined with electrical stimulation on the type of sarcomeres produced at the ends of muscle fibers.

Stretching a muscle results in a rapid addition of sarcomeres at the ends of the muscle fibers. The effect of a pattern of electrical stimulation resembling that of a slow motoneuron on the newly formed muscle tissue in a stretched, fast-contracting muscle was investigated. We found that after a period as short as 4 days, the type of sarcomeres which were added on to the ends of the existing myofibrils differed from those in the middle regions of the experimental muscles: there was a much higher proportion of type I and type IIA sarcomeres in the stretch-stimulated ends.