Implantable defibrillator versus conventional drug therapy

Kaplan-Meier cumulative survival curves in the MADIT trial showing that selected high-risk patients (prior infarction, left ventricular ejection fraction ≤35 percent, nonsustained ventricular tachycardia, and an inducible sustained ventricular tachyarrhythmia not supressible with procainamide) have a better survival rate with an implantable defibrillator compared with conventional therapy with antiarrhythmic drugs (p = 0.009). The number of patients at each time period is noted at the bottom.