Paroxysmal Tachycardia in Infancy

There have been many reports of paroxysmal tachycardia as it occurs in adults, some describing it in children, but very few in which infants alone are considered. Yet, though diagnosis in infancy is most urgent, it is then least familiar; there must still be many cases misdiagnosed, for example, as pneumonia. In an outstanding paper Hubbard (1941) first drew attention to the clinical picture of paroxysmal tachycardia in infancy. He described nine personal cases, the largest individual series so far. In 1952 Nadas, Daeschner, Roth and Blumenthal incorporated Hubbard's and other cases, taking infants and children together, and making a total of 41 seen over a period of 20 years at the Boston Children's Hospital. Some valuable conclusions about differences between the two age groups were drawn. In this country, since Poynton and Wyllie (1926) reported a case of 'delirium cordis' in infancy, very few cases have been published (Leys, 1945; Neubauer, 1945; Wright, 1953). We present here a short account of 13 further cases of paroxysmal tachycardia in early infancy.