[History of surgical treatment of cardiac arrhythmias in Germany : Surgical treatment of ventricular tachycardia and supraventricular tachycardia, especially pre-excitation syndromes (WPW)].

The history of surgical treatment of ventricular tachycardias (VT) is short, lasting from 1978 until 1993. "Indirect procedures" with infarct scar resection were performed without electrophysiologic studies, whereas "direct procedures" consisted of either complete endocardial incisions ("encircling endocardial ventriculotomy") or large endocardial resections ("endocardial peel-off" technique) after precise epicardial and endocardial mapping procedures. In Germany, the first to report on intra-operative electrophysiologic mapping for VT treatment were Ostermeyer, Breithardt and Seipel in 1979. In 1981, the Hannover group (Frank, Klein) published their first results of surgical treatment of VT. In 1984, Ostermeyer et al. demonstrated that a partial endocardial incision resulted in more beneficial results with less myocardial damage (8% versus 46%) than applying a complete encircling incision. In 1987, the Düsseldorf group reported treatment results of 93 patients. After 5 years, 77% had no VT recurrence, while total mortality after 1 year was 11% and after 5 years 30%. In 1992, the Hannover group reported results of 147 patients after endocardial resection for VT. Total mortality after 3 years was 27%; recurrence of VT events occurred in 18% of the surviving cohort.The history of surgical procedures for supraventricular tachycardia (SVT), in particular Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome, is even shorter than that of surgery for VT. As early as 1969, Sealy, Gallagher and Cox reported the first cases of surgical intervention for WPW syndrome via endocardial access in cardioplegic arrest. In 1984, Guiraudon and Klein reported on a new procedure with epicardial access to the accessory bundle without cardioplegia in laterally localised conduction pathways. In Germany, too, the groups in Düsseldorf (Ostermeyer, Seipel, Breithardt, Borggrefe) from 1980 and the Hannover group (Frank, Klein and Kallfelz) from 1981 performed surgical procedures for WPW syndrome. In 1987, Borggrefe reported on 18 patients with WPW syndrome and atrial fibrillation who had undergone surgery. After 2 years, 14 of 18 patients had no recurrences of tachycardia; in 1989, Frank, Klein and Kallfelz (Hannover) reported on 10 children (2-14 years) operated on using the cryoablation technique. Between 1984 and 1992, a total of 120 patients with SVT, mostly WPW syndrome, were operated on in Hannover; after 42 months, 12 patients had a recurrence of SVT. Two patients died during the reoperation.