ECG of Ventricular Tachycardia and Cardiac Arrest

00:01 What about if you keep stringing one PVC after another? That's called ventricular tachycardia.

00:07 It's a very fast heart rhythm, usually consists of more than three PVCs in a row.

00:12 And what it is, it's a circus movement, not so much in the atrium.

00:17 Remember, atrial tachycardia was this circus movement around and around.

00:20 Here, the around and around is occurring in the ventricle, results in a very fast heart rate which often is very ineffective, therefore the blood pressure drops, the patients may collapse or faint.

00:31 And from there, they may actually go into ventricular fibrillation or cardiac arrest as we'll show you in a moment.

00:37 The longer the run, the faster the rate of ventricular tachycardia, the more dangerous is this arrhythmia since it can deteriorate as I said, into ventricular fibrillation or cardiac arrest.

00:49 Here, we see an example of a rapid ventricular tachycardia.

00:53 The rate is 180 per minute. The heart does not work efficiently at 180 per minute.

00:58 The blood pressure drops. This is a dangerous arrhythmia that can deteriorate into ventricular fibrillation.

01:05 Here's another example, not quite so bad.

01:08 Here, the heart rate is 140-150. You'll notice it's very regular, right? Because it's just - it's a circular movement in the ventricle just like supraventricular tachycardia is this circus movement in the atrium, this is the circus movement in the ventricle.

01:24 You'll notice the rhythm strip at the bottom, very rapid. Here, a heart rate of 140-150, so the patient might have a blood pressure but they obviously would be distressed; shorter breaths, uncomfortable.

01:36 If they had narrowing’s in their coronary arteries, they might be having chest pain.

01:41 Notice that there are no P waves before the QRSs.

01:44 Here, we see an example of ventricular tachycardia deteriorating into ventricular fibrillation.

01:52 So, ventricular tachycardia is the circus movement around and around and then we go into chaos.

01:57 Remember I said with atrial fibrillation, the electrical activity is just chaotic? Here, we see the electrical activity chaotic, but it's in the ventricle. What happens? The blood pressure goes down almost a zero, this is a cardiac arrest.

02:12 And very, very fast ventricular tachycardia, here at 200 per minute.

02:18 Again, this is gonna be associated with a low blood pressure close to a cardiac arrest.

02:22 Some people will call this ventricular flutter, very fast rate.

02:27 And this is very, very dangerous arrhythmia.

02:30 Very high risk of becoming ventricular fibrillation within a few seconds and going on to cardiac arrests.

02:36 And here's ventricular fibrillation.

02:39 The chaotic electrical activity within the ventricles characterized by different sized complexes.

02:45 If untreated, eventually, this becomes a flatline and the person is dead.

02:50 Here, we see another example. Here's ventricular fibrillation.

02:55 And towards the end, there's almost no electrical activity.

02:59 This is very difficult to resuscitate; this patient.

03:02 You can see, total chaos in the ventricular activity.