Heart Rhythm Conditions – Welcome to the group

I have hypothyroid I take synthroid I also have has arrithmas for several years . My heart missed a beat and then went very fat to catch up.I have hospilzed with suspected TIA 3 times and have has EKG and several heart test which were all normal. I have had several holter tests none of them showed A/FIB
I wear a Fitbit watch which detected A/FIB AT 5am, It wakened me up. My cardiologist put me Eliquis 5mg twice daily and Bisoprolol 5 MG Valsartan 20 MG l was able to trace the A/Fib associated mainly with drinking wine and caffeine .I stopped drinking wine ,all caffeine tea & chocolate all spiced foods also ginger garlic & Tumirin and all hot peppers. According to my watch I don’t appear to have any more episodes of A/FIB Since. I have severe high spikes associated with walking at the mall, making dinner. My HR Goes spikes to over 125 when I am walking or grocery shopping. Is this unusual?

@jovi45 Those spikes are natural in all likelihood. As you stand from sitting, your heart must work harder to get blood from further below your heart back up to your lungs. You will spike just standing from seated. Then, if you begin to move around, maybe use your arms also, there is more 'work' being done, and your heart rate will climb further. This is both desirable and normal....it helps you to function those ways. What would worry you is if your 'spike' goes past 135 or so, maybe over 145, just walking casually or even when seated and calm. There is only a possibly disordered heart that would need a rise in HR to the 140's and higher to let you walk to the kitchen. Or a heart in arrhythmia, such as in the case of POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome), or maybe in atrial fibrillation (AF). I don't see how you can have an arrhythmia with an HR around 125 when you are moving about. I could be wrong, and I'm also not medically trained. The thing to do, when you have symptoms, or see that your HR is above 125 when just doing normal stuff, is to take a Kardia or Fitbit reading, and then look at its graphical representation, the one that looks like a real ECG. Either device 'should' be able to upload the file to an app where you can see what the squiggles look like. Any arrhythmia will either be too fast, or there will be a nasty mess to look at, including no P wave and the highest peaks don't have the same distance...they're spaced out randomly. That would be AF.

The Holter can only record what really happens when it is on you recording. If you take off the leads and turn it in, and driving home you have a short run of AF, that's a miss. Your Fitbit may have been wrong, but it may have been right. You should have a record still on it of that detection. See if you can find it, upload it to the app, and look at it. Show it to your doctor.

@kjhunt
I had Afib which lasted 10-12 hours, pounding, until I had an Ablation. Do you have access to an Electro-Cardiologist?

@leeman25 I’m sure my family doctor can set me up. Seeing him next week.

Thank you for welcoming me to this group. Ive delt with AFIB for quite some time but after my third ablation at Rochester I’m truly enjoying life without all of the numerous issues related to AFIB . I was at my wits end and so greatfull for Dr Kapa and staff at Mayo.
However after going back to “normal” I became aware of shortness of breath I wasn’t used to I was unaware of because of the AFIB symptoms. I’ve been diagnosed with Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction. ((HFpEF). I believe The drug Farxiga is having a positive effect and I believe I’m getting better but to what end I’m not certain of. I’m curious if others are experiencing anything similar and hoping you all are benefiting from services at this wonderful facility. Bob

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40458324/
I am not learned on HF of any kind, but the citation above suggests you might respond well to 'cardio-rehab', which some hospitals offer.

I would wake up at 2:30 in the morning with what felt like an electrical circuit racing around my heart. It would go away once I was up. I went to the ER at the local hospital and they would check me out and not see anything. I wore a Holter monitor and nothing. I read one of the posts here that described perfectly what I was going through and that was the vagus nerve acting up. Now, I take a deep breath into my abdomen and hold it and the symptoms fade away and I go back to sleep.

New here. My name is Faith. 49 yo mother of two boys. Work in medical field. Had to call 911 yesterday because I had an SVT episode and I panicked. I think I get an anxiety attack on top of the SVT episode which makes it worse. I’m concerned because it’s beginning to be more frequent. Now a day after it happened I am paralyzed in fear that it will happen again. And tired because I had to take a Xanax. Does anyone know if magnesium helps these episodes or bothers them. I’m new to educating myself on this diagnoses. Any info is appreciated.

@faithb It depends on whether your nutrition is sufficient or maybe an endocrine problem. It is said in some sources that few modern citizens in the western world get sufficient magnesium these days, but only an RBC test will be definitive. Meanwhile, healthy kidneys will dump modest excesses over what their hosts can use, so often cited is a figure of supplementing up to 400 mg daily, which is not normally problematic. For most people.

I'm nothing close to educated on tachyarrhythmias, but I would think that PACs or AF might be much more common for electrolyte deficiencies....but it is also linked to SVT:
https://academic.oup.com/ehjcvp/article/3/2/108/2669829
I hope this won't sound patronizing or lecturing....don't mean it that way: your worst problem right now is the anxiety. You HAVE TO find a way to quell it. Your heart may or may not be permanently electrically disordered...only time will tell. If it's a temporary concern easily diagnosed and corrected, great! It will soon be history and you'll have learned something. If it's a journey toward other arrhythmias, or just more frequent PACs and it's incremental 'burden', then you might be further ahead to consult an electrophysiologist (EP) soon and get in line for an ablation. Ablating SVT has a pretty good record of success, albeit with variance between EPs, their training and experience.

@faithb Faith, see my posts about my experiences with severe SVT over the last six months. I am 100% in touch with what you're going through. I saw the specialists (cardiologist, electrophysiologist), did what needed to be done. Spoiler: my 6-month journey has a really happy ending. Yours can too!