Ventricular tachycardia, or VT, is a rapid heartbeat that often causes sudden death. It’s difficult to manage and not all patients respond well to medication.

A five year clinical trial called VANISH, which recently wrapped up at the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax, is providing hope and an alternative treatment.

Marc Arbour was the first patient to enroll in VANISH.

“I had my first heart attack in 1979 when I was 34 years old,” says Arbour.

In 2001, doctors revived him after another cardiac arrest.

“From there, they put in a pacemaker defibrillator in order to regulate my heart,” Arbour tells CTV News.

“A heart attack can leave a scar in the heart which can later lead to dangerous heart rhythms,” says Dr. John Sapp, a cardiologist and the principal investigator of VANISH. “The most frequent of which is called ventricular tachycardia.”

The trial’s goal was to find better treatments for patients living with VT who, like Arbour, have implanted defibrillators.

I had the option of staying on perhaps opioid drugs or heavy drug use for the rest of my life or trying this procedure, ablation procedure,” says Arbour.

“Catheter ablation is a procedure where we put wires up through the blood vessels into the heart and we find the short circuits that are causing the bad heart rhythm,” says Dr. Sapp.

Patients were randomly treated with either escalated drug therapy or catheter ablation then followed for at least a year.

Dr. Sapp says while VT is difficult to treat and recurrences are common, those who had the procedure tended to do better.

“They had significantly fewer recurrences of the arrhythmia and the side effects of that treatment were less than with the drugs,” says Dr. Sapp.

Arbour describes the procedure as minimally invasive and says he recovered quickly.

“I felt much more energized than I had in so many years.”

Dr. Sapp says these types of clinical trials are critical to patient care.

“It is how we make medical decisions with the best quality evidence,” Dr. Sapp states.

The VANISH study took place in 22 centres around the world, including Canada, Europe, Australia and the United States, with 259 patients participating.

The results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine.