INTRAINDIVIDUAL REPRODUCIBILITY OF TILT-TABLE TESTING FOR DIAGNOSIS OF NEURALLY-MEDIATED SYNCOPE

Neurally-induced syncope appears to be the underlying pathophysiologic mechanism in many patients with unexplained syncope. Diagnosis of vas ovagal syncope, however, remains difficult and constitutes in many cas es an exclusion diagnosis. The present study thus aimed to determine t he yield of tilt-table testing in the work-up of patients with unexpla ined syncope and most importantly to examine the reproducibility of th e results of this method. Twenty-four patients with a history of synco pe and 11 healthy volunteers were examined on 2 days. In 10 patients, symptoms could be provoked during tilting, in 8 during both tests, in 2 only on one occasion. Only 1 of 11 volunteers developed presyncope d uring tilting which was not reproducible during the second test. These findings resulted in a sensitivity of 42 % and a specificity of 91 % for the protocol employed in this study. Overall reproducibility was 9 1 % which suggests that this tilt-table protocol is suitable for evalu ation of therapeutic interventions in patients with neurally-mediated syncope.