Guidelines and Expert Consensus Documents summarize and evaluate all currently available evidence on a particular issue with the aim of assisting physicians in selecting the best management strategies for a typical patient, suffering from a given condition, taking into account the impact on outcome, as well as the risk/benefit ratio of particular diagnostic or therapeutic means. Guidelines are no substitutes for textbooks. The legal implications of medical guidelines have been previously discussed.

Approximately 30% of patients treated with cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) do not achieve favourable response. The purpose of the present study was to identify echocardiographic and clinical predictors of a positive response to CRT.

Long QT syndrome (LQTS) is majorly an autosomal dominantly inherited electrical dysfunction, but there are exceptions (Jervell and Lange-Nielsen syndrome is inherited in an autosomal recessive pattern). This disorder prolongs ventricular repolarization and increases the risk of ventricular arrhythmias, syncope, and even sudden cardiac death. The risk of fatal events is reduced during pregnancy, but dramatically increases during the 9 months after delivery, especially in patients with LQT2. In women with LQTS, treatment with β-blockers at appropriate doses is recommended throughout pregnancy and the high-risk postnatal period. In this review, we summarize the management of LQTS during pregnancy and beyond.

Sheep could be an excellent research subject for large animal experimental studies because of their heart structure and physiology have a lot similarity to the human. Long term ECG monitoring is a convenient tool for human and possibly veterinary clinical practice and research. Continuous ECG recording can be used to monitor and evaluate body physiological responses in various experimental conditions. Experience on sheep ECG monitoring techniques is sparse and mostly focused on short term ECG recordings. We developed a peculiar technique of 24-hour sheep ECG monitoring based on the available data on large mammal model, where we tried to share some insights and practical solutions working with this type of animals for ECG monitoring by using several commercially available ECG monitors also used for the human practice. Some producer specific hardware and software characteristic that we found important in daily practice were also discussed. In conclusion, sheep as big animal is relatively good object for Holter monitoring experimental studies: ECG monitoring is easily affordable, registered ECG signal is of similar quality as in human clinical practice, which is sufficient for the heart rhythm monitoring and arrhythmia and conduction disorder diagnostics. Additional effort might be needed for 24-hour heart rate variability calculations because manual revision of software ECG signal interpretations is requiring, but short-term calculations can be made easy.