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Heart Rhythm Conditions – Welcome to the group
Heart Rhythm Conditions | Last Active: 3 days ago | Replies (1055)Comment receiving replies
A quick medical profile:
I'm a 64 year old male
6'1" 210 lbs
Walk 4-7 miles a day
I take magnesium supplements
I drink 1 cup of coffee per day
I avoid sugar
I eat no red meat
Yet, I've had 2 heart attacks and have had 3 stents placed
Test data says the plumbing in my heart is great, but…
I experience as many as 34,000 pvc waves per day, 72% are classified as bigeminy, some trigeminy.
– To date they're benign; not increasing with exertion
– Symptomatically, I can become light headed, dizzy and sometimes short of breath
– I can be out of breath after feeding the dog, but be fine 20 minutes later doing a 3 mile walk.
– I had an attempted ablation, but the origin of the PVCs was not accessible.
I've subsequently been diagnosed with severe central sleep apnea… my breathing stops on average of once every 60 seconds (severe apnea is considered more that 20 times a hour.)
Additionally, my brain has become desensitized to the constant stopping of breaths and surges of adrenaline resulting in Cheyne-Stokes breathing.
Both of these are likely drivers of my PVC's.
I'm now on a type of CPAP; an Adaptive Servo-Ventilation (ASV) sleep machine that has eliminated the occurrence of apnea events and seemingly reduced the PVC load. By how much is hard to say until I wear a monitor again, but interruptive symptoms are down to about one hour a day.
I'm here because I want to make sure I'm not missing anything in my control that I can do to avoid a lifetime of medication without compromising my health.
Are you aware of any holistic approaches to mitigate or eliminate pvc waves or interventions not requiring meds?
Thank You!
Replies to "A quick medical profile: I'm a 64 year old male 6'1" 210 lbs Walk 4-7 miles..."
Buc7777,
Over what period of time did you experience 9000 PVCs? 24 hours? or 72 hours?
PVCs are the most dangerous as the amount of blood that builds up following a PVC is far more than a regular beast and is what causes thickening of the left ventricle wall as the heart has to work much harder to push the extra volume out to the rest of the body. This thickening is whaat actually causes heart failure in many of us.
Glad you are doing far better.
Elena
I am wondering if you have heard of Hawthorne? It is used world-wide for heart problems. Now onto another thing...Have you heard of ATP? What it stands for I don't know, but I do know that the building blocks for ATP are D-Ribos, Carnatine and CoQ10. My Cardiologist told me to take them to help my heart. D-Ribose is a 5 sided sugar that is necessary for optimum heaart function and will not raise your glucose levels.
Elena
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I'm in no way an expert and my symptoms are 1/8 of what you are experiencing, thus my "story" may not help. However, I too was diagnosed with PVC's (about 9,000). On top of that, I had serious sinus problems & finally had sinus surgery which cured much of my sleep problems. Sounds odd, but you might check into that because after my sinus surgery, MANY of my previous health issues vanished (I had major sinus issues; bacterial/fungal infection/polups, etc.).
Back to the heart issue. I am 44 yr old, 180 lb. and "used" to exercise a lot, but haven't done much at all in the past 15 yr. I don't smoke, drink a few beers now/then and 4 cups of coffee/d. I am overly cautious about any meds, so much that it took me many discussions with my Heart doc, a few more with a cousin who is a "brain" at Duke (heart doc) to finally try metotoprolol after diagnosed with PVC's. The 1st night of taking 25 mg pill (this is after my sinus surgery), I slept better than I have in 20 years. It was life-changing. However, you want to make sure that your blood pressure doesn't drop too low; mine never did (min. of 110/60 or so). I am not taking toporol sporadically and only 1/2 pill at a time. Was told that I could take it like tylenol; just when needed vs. every day.
Hope something in my story helps you out. I've been extremely lucky over the past 3 yr "side-stepping" malignant melanoma, getting my sinuses cleaned out, and no issues with PVCs other than discomfort at times. Travis.