Today, while looking for blog posts about ICDs and cardiac arrhythmias, I came across the Long Q-T Syndrome Blog. The first story I found was by a woman with long Q-T syndrome who had recently had her ICD replaced in Norway.

Once I checked out the blog itself, I found that it’s done by a group of contributors, and is associated with a long Q-T site, QTsyndrome.ch, which has apparently been around for 10 years! In the past I’ve focused rather narrowly on computational cardiac electrophysiology, and had been frustrated by the lack of other bloggers covering the same field. However, I’m starting to find that while cardiologists may not be predisposed to blogging, patients are! Below are two YouTube videos, found via the Long Q-T Syndrome Blog, on long Q-T syndrome. Neither of them does a great job of explaining what the syndrome is caused by at a low level, but there’s a good FAQ on it here, as well as a short history of the disease and some background on the genetics of inherited long Q-T syndrome.

Those videos also don’t do a good job of explaining what the Q-T interval is. In a somewhat-simplified explanation, it’s the time between when your heart’s ventricles (the major pumps) start contracting, and when they stop contracting and rest. A more detailed explanation of the different parts of an ECG trace, including the Q-T interval, is available on the ECG Learning Center.

And now, the videos: