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	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

We read with interest the study by Ehret and colleagues¹ suggesting that clinically significant QTc interval prolongation (>500 milliseconds) occurred in over 16% of hospitalized patients receiving methadone. In practice, this probably overestimates the expected frequency of QTc prolongation with methadone use, given the authors’ exclusion criteria, but nonetheless suggests that considerable QTc prolongation with methadone use is probably not a rare phenomena.

The authors observed a modest correlation between methadone dose and the absolute QTc interval (r = +0.2; P<.01). Although they suggest that a dose-dependent effect of methadone has not been previously described in the hospital setting, we found a similar correlation between methadone dose and QTc among methadone-treated patients hospitalized with TdP (r = +0.51; P = .03).² Variation in the strength of this correlation may be related to the fact that only 3.6% of the cohort in the study by Ehret et al¹ experienced documented TdP . . . [Full Text of this Article]

AUTHOR INFORMATION
John Schmittner, MD; Mori J. Krantz, MD

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