Can heart rate variability predict sudden death? A case of sudden death in a child with severe coronary sequelae of Kawasaki disease.

We report the heart rate variability (HRV) of a child aged 11 years. Arrhythmia was the suspected cause of sudden death after 10 years of therapy for Kawasaki disease. The linear methods failed to show any features of the HRV that could have predicted the patient's sudden death, but the fractal scaling as a nonlinear method had suddenly decreased from 5.3 to 4.1 1 year before his death.