What does left anterior fascicular hemiblock mean on a normal ECG?
14 Oct 05 Professor John Hampton, emeritus professor of cardiology, University of Nottingham The ECG at our surgery provides an interpretation of any ECG undertaken. A quite common finding is ‘left anterior fascicular hemiblock’. If there are no cardiac symptoms and the ECG has been taken for another reason, such as assessment of end-organ damage in hypertension, how should the ECG be managed? A word of warning about automatic ECG interpretation. Automatic reports are design-ed as much to protect the manufacturers as to help the patient – they tend to over-report to ensure that nothing is missed. As a result a lot of ECG changes that are actually normal variants get interpreted as abnormal. It is unwise to depend totally on an automatic report, and I hope you know enough about ECGs to interpret the reports with caution. Left anterior hemiblock means left axis deviation (ie, a dominant S wave in both leads two and three – and I have come across automatic reports that describe left axis
