What is cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT)?

Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT), also known as biventricular pacing, is to add left ventricular pacing on the basis of traditional pacing, and treat patients with heart failure whose ventricles are not synchronized by biventricular pacing. Cardiac resynchronization therapy can improve patients' cardiac function, exercise tolerance and quality of life, which is a landmark breakthrough in the history of heart failure treatment.

Cardiac resynchronization therapy increases left ventricular pacing on the basis of traditional dual-chamber pacing. The left ventricular pacing electrode enters the coronary sinus orifice of the right atrium through the lateral wall branch of the left ventricular posterior wall of the coronary vein to pace the left ventricle, and the left and right ventricular electrodes pace to restore ventricular synchronous contraction and reduce mitral regurgitation.

Extended data

Cardiac resynchronization therapy is an important method to treat heart failure at present. Indications of cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) mainly include: on the basis of drug treatment, there are still symptoms of cardiac insufficiency. As one of the treatment methods of congestive heart failure, the curative effect of CRT has been affirmed and recognized.

However, there are still some problems to be solved, such as how to choose the right CRT population, how to improve the success rate of CRT implantation, how to give full play to the curative effect of CRT, how to define the indications of CRT-D, etc. In particular, CRT can not completely replace anti-heart failure drug therapy, and perfect drug therapy is one of the first conditions for CRT to exert its curative effect.