Usefulness of sotalol for drug-refractory malignant ventricular arrhythmias

Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco.

Fifty patients with recurrent sustained symptomatic ventricular tachycardia (43 patients) or ventricular fibrillation (7 patients) resistant to a mean of 2.8 + 1.4 antiarrhythmic drugs were treated with sotalol, a beta-adrenergic receptor antagonist, and 45 underwent invasive electrophysiologic testing before and after sotalol therapy. The arrhythmia became noninducible in 10, was slower and hemodynamically well tolerated in 12 and was poorly tolerated in 23. Four patients were empirically treated with long-term administration of oral sotalol as were 21 patients who either had noninducible arrhythmia (10 patients) or had hemodynamically stable ventricular tachycardia (11 patients). In these 25 patients treated with long-term administration of sotalol, there was no recurrence of ventricular tachycardia in the group with noninducible arrhythmia, whereas 37% of patients with inducible ventricular tachycardia had new ventricular tachycardia or sudden death. Programmed ventricular stimulation with up to three extrastimuli proved to be an excellent predictor of drug efficacy and a good predictor of inefficacy. A positive prior response to amiodarone was not a reliable indicator of a positive response to sotalol. Side effects included those attributed to both beta-adrenergic blockade as well as proarrhythmic effects. The latter were observed in two of four patients with a QT interval greater than 600 ms. Sotalol was found to be effective therapy for a subset of patients with ventricular tachycardia unresponsive to type IA drugs.

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