Tick, tick… boom?

Often the people with most ‘need’—comorbidities and complications—cannot access all the diagnostic help available. Such is the problem with the concerns regarding ‘non-MRI conditional’ implanted cardiovascular devices and MRI. A Fo Ben reads with interest, therefore, about an American registry of 1.5-Tesla MRIs where 1000 people had a pacemaker and 500 had an implantable cardioverter–defibrillator (ICD). In total, there were 1499 lethal explosions… no, no sorry—I mean nothing happened. Well, nothing really. In one case (where the pre-MRI programming protocol was ignored), the ICD generator could not be interrogated afterwards, and there were six cases of self-terminating atrial fibrillation or flutter and six cases of …