Author/Editor		Cankar, Ksenija; Melik, Živa; Kobal, Jan; Starc, Vito
Title		Evidence of cardiac electrical remodeling in patients with Huntington disease
Type		članek
Vol. and No.		Letnik 8, št. 8
Publication year		2018
Volume		str. [1-5]
ISSN		2162-3279 - Brain and behavior
Language		eng
Abstract		Although Huntington's disease (HD) is a disease of the central nervous system, HD mortality surveys indicate heart disease as a major cause of death. Cardiac dysfunction in HD might be a primary consequence of peripherally expressed mutant huntingtin or secondary to either a general decline in health or the onset of neurological dysfunction. The aim of the study was to clarify the heart muscle involvement. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We measured conventional and advanced resting ECG indices. Thirty-one subjects with a confirmed huntingtin gene mutation and 31 age- and gender-matched controls were included. The HD subjects were divided into four groups based on their Unified Huntington Disease Rating Scale (UHDRS) motor score. RESULTS: We detected changes in advanced ECG variables connected with electrical ventricular remodeling (t test, p < 0.01). The increase in the unexplained part of both QT variability and the standard deviation of normal-to-normal QT intervals, presumably reflecting beat-to-beat changes in repolarization, was most pronounced. Further, both variables correlated with the product of the cytosine-adenine-guanine (CAG) triplets' repeat length and the subjects' age (CAP), the former R = 0.423 (p = 0.018) and the latter R = 0.499 (p = 0.004). There was no correlation between the CAP score and any of variables representing autonomic nervous system activity. CONCLUSIONS: Both autonomic nervous system dysfunction and cardiac electrical remodeling are present in patients with HD. The changes in advanced ECG variables observed in the study evolve with HD progression. The increased values of QT unexplained variability may be a marker of temporal inhomogeneity in ventricular repolarization associated with malignant ventricular arrhythmias.
Keywords		Huntingtonova bolezen elektrokardiografija bolezni srca avtonomni živčni sistem Huntington's disease advanced ECG analysis heart disease autonomic nervous system