The Relationship Between QT Interval and Intra-Hospital Mortality in patients with Spontaneous Intracranial Hemorrhage.

Introduction: Repolarization abnormalities such as prolongation of QT interval and changes in ST segment and T wave are the most usual electrocardiogram (ECG) changes in patients with intracranial hemorrhage (ICH). It has recently been recommended that prolonged QTc interval raises the risk of death due to malignant ventricular arrhythmias or sudden cardiac death.

Objective: The goal of this study was to evaluate the relationship between QT interval and death in patients with ICH.

Method: This cross-sectional study was performed on patients with ICH who referred during 2015-2017 to Poursina Hospital, Rasht, Iran. The QT interval was manually measured based on the BAZETT formula. Max QT and Max QTc and QT dispersion were the variables evaluated by the ECG of the patients. The outcome under the study was the death or survival of patients during hospitalization.

Results: Finally, 466 cases with the mean age of 69±12 years were studied of whom 68.7% were male. The average QT-Max interval was 350.4±56.5 milliseconds, and the average QTc-Max was 583.6±57.6 msec. Totally, 22.7% of the patients died. There was a significant statistical relationship between QTc-MAX and death (p=0.001). However, there was no statistically significant relationship between QT-MAX and the outcome (p=0.593).

Conclusion: It is likely that, prolonged QT interval is correlated with in-hospital mortality of patients with ICH. Therefore, it can be expected that assessing ECG abnormalities, especially prolonged QTc could be valuable in these patients.