BRIEF REPORT Fourteen-Year Follow-up in a Teenager with Congenital Long QT Syndrome Masquerading as

Long QT syndrome is a potentially lethal cardiac channelopathy that can be mistaken for epilepsy in young people. We report a 17-year-old man who was initially treated as having both daytime and noc-turnal idiopathic epilepsy for 5 years. A series of electrocardiograms showed the time of the convulsive episodes, and genetic testing lead to the final diagnosis. The combined use of a -blocker and a pace-maker implant incompletely abolished the torsade de pointes. After an additional near-fatal event, a cardioverter defibrillator was implanted as final bridge therapy. An electrocardiogram with the correct calculation of the QT interval should be performed on all young people with a suggestive history; that is, treat refractory convulsive episodes specifically with nondiagnostic electroencephalograms. (J Am Board Fam Med 2009;22:331–4.) Congenital long QT (LQT) syndrome, one of the leading causes of sudden cardiac death in people younger than 20 years of age and is a potentially lethal cardiac channelopathy that can be mistaken for epilepsy. Disease prevalence is estimated to be anywhere between 1 in 5,0001 to 1 in 20,000.2 Th