Stokes Adams attacks and cardiovascular syncope

✍ Scribed by J Harbison; JL Newton; C Seifer; RA Kenny

• Book ID: 117279584
• Publisher: The Lancet
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 239 KB
• Volume: 359
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0140-6736
• DOI: 10.1016/s0140-6736(02)07376-2

✦ Synopsis

The classical description of a Stokes Adams attack is of collapse without warning, associated with loss of consciousness lasting a few seconds. The affected individual is pale initially, but can become flushed on recovery from the episode. This flushing does not always occur, and some seizure-like activity can be noted if the attack is prolonged. The disorder is typically associated with complete heart block, but has also been described in other diseases such as tachy-brady syndrome. 1 Stokes (figure 1) first described syncope associated with bradycardia in his 1846 article, "Observations of some cases of permanently slow pulse", 2 in which he also described what is now known as periodic or Cheyne Stokes breathing. In the same article, he acknowledged Adams, who had described a similar case of syncope in 1827. These were not, however, the first recorded descriptions of the syndrome. Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682-1771) described a very similar disorder in "De sedibus et causis morborum" (1761), a work that also contains the first known descriptions of angina pectoris and intracardiac thrombus.

The term Stokes