HEART BEATING FAST FOR NO REASON TV

HEART BEATING FAST FOR NO REASON TV

You might have seen this on commercials or on TV shows where people are running about with these pads, drop them on a patient, and then provide an electric shock. The mainstay of treatments you might see if you go online is something called a defibrillator. In those patients, we like to risk stratify to figure out are these arrhythmias dangerous, and how do we protect those patients from dying suddenly. In other words, they can lead to sudden death. But some might just feel tired.īut then, the other group we worry about is the ones in whom these arrhythmias can potentially be mortal. In those patients who don't have dangerous ventricular arrhythmias, we're looking to treat to improve quality of life, or symptoms, because some patients can have a variety of symptoms attributable to these arrhythmias, including feelings of skipped beats or rapid heart beats, or even dizziness. And then when we talk about treatment, we're looking really at two large areas.

Is it something that is life-threatening, or is not, because not all of them are. We're also trying to figure out how significant the arrhythmia is. So what do I mean by this? When we talk about evaluation, we're looking to see, Is there another reason they happened? Was there a medication you were placed on, was there some abnormality in your electrolytes, or what you were taking for other reasons, such as over-the counter herbal remedies, that might have contributed to why you might have those arrhythmias, and in fact they might go away if we do nothing else? When we look at these arrhythmias happening, however, we have to take a systematic approach to their evaluation and to their treatment. And in these patients, these ventricular arrhythmias can potentially be life-threatening. All of these different syndromes can contribute to electrical abnormalities in the bottom chamber of the heart as well, but sometimes, when people have what we call substrate, or abnormalities of the normal heart architecture, this can lead to ventricular arrhythmias. You might have some inflammatory disorder of your heart, such as sarcoidosis or myocarditis. There are a variety of reasons that the heart can become structurally abnormal, such as if you've had a heart attack in the past, if you have some sort of genetic abnormality that you might have inherited from your mother or your father. Now, in some patients, however, they can have an abnormal heart for other reasons. In rare cases, if the heart is structurally normal, this can actually result in a dangerous rhythm, though again that's relatively rare if there's not some other underlying heart disease that might be contributing. These can appear as occasional extra beats that one might experience as skipped beats, or as a rapid array of beats that are occurring all in a row, termed ventricular tachycardia. What we mean by this is that there are some patients out there who really have no other underlying heart disease except some abnormality in their electrical system of the bottom chambers of their heart, or the ventricles, that can cause the heart to go out of rhythm. Ventricular arrhythmias can occur in both structurally normal and structurally abnormal hearts. But I'm going to try and clarify things for you a little bit, both about what this might be and how we might go about treating it. Now, if you go on the internet and you look up ventricular tachycardia, you might find yourself concerned because people tell you, oh, this is associated with sudden death, or, oh, you might have to seek urgent medical attention. Today, I'm going to talk about the condition known as ventricular tachycardia. Suraj Kapa, a Mayo Clinic cardiologist specializing in heart rhythm disorders.

Heart beating fast for no reason