- Heart Rate Turbulence

Heart rate turbulence (HRT) is a phenomenon discovered during the mid-to late 1990s by Georg Schmidt’s group in Munich (Schmidt et al., 1999). Their study of sinus rhythm following ventricular premature beats (often abbreviated as VPC, where C stands for complex or contraction) using signal averaging techniques historically applied to the study of electrocardiographic late potentials revealed that after a single arrhythmic ventricular beat, the heart rate increased* and then decreased before returning to baseline. Clinical research revealed that patients in whom this ¬uctuation of sinus rhythm was absent had a higher likelihood of dying (Schmidt et al., 1999).