prominent q wave?

rstewart · Oct 13, 2005

please give feedback with regards to a patient of 26 years old ecg strip shows prominent q wave with depth of 0.08-0.1 mm and width of 0.02 at widest point. Normal measurements everywhere else. Pt has no known caridac history, Is this anything or just a funky little rhythm?

hmmmmm......Well the first step would be to determine whether your q wave is significant in width or depth.

Although unspecified I'm going to assume that the 0.02 is in seconds since that is the norm for the horizintal axis. Generally that is not wide enough to be significant.

The furnished depth confuses me. You state the depth as .08-.1mm. Since each small box is 1 mm, you are saying the depth of your q wave is only one tenth of a small box; since you say the wave appears "prominent" I doubt that is what you meant. And since the .1mV=only 1 small box, clearly you did not mean mV either although that is the normal unit of measure.

I am going to guess that since you learned "1 small box = .04" horizontally, that the same can be said vertically. So I am going to guess that your strip had a q wave 2-2.5 small boxes deep. One common rule of thumb is to be significant it must be larger than 1/4 the height of the corresponding R wave. So in if your q wave is 2 small boxes and the corresponding R is less than 8 boxes it wouldn't be significant.

And you would have to know which lead we are talking about because significant Q waves can normally occur in certain leads.

So to answer your question: I dunno.