Clinical, electrocardiographic and genetic risk factors for sudden cardiac death

Sudden cardiac death (SCD) is a major health problem and accounts for a substantial part of all natural deaths in the Western world. Ventricular arrhythmias, of which ventricular fibrillation (VF) is the most common, underlie most of SCDs in the general population. Therefore, understanding, predicting and preventing VF seems to be the most successful solution to reduce SCD incidence. This thesis focused mainly on ECG-documented potentially lethal ventricular arrhythmias and aimed to distillate their clinical, electrocardiographic and genetic determinants.