Heart Rhythm Conditions – Welcome to the group

I understand. I am 76. I started having irregular heartbeat and traced to caffeine. I quit the caffeine, but lately having heartbeat issues lasting a couple of minutes, but today had one lasting longer. Am discouraged. Always considered myself a health nut. Eat better than anyone I know but not perfect. I believe it is after effects of covid I had. Not looking for advice. I do not run to the doctor for anything. Just venting my frustration.

Welcome! I've been learning a lot from this group. I am turning 81 in January and have lived a similar active life. I let my three mile a day habit lapse when I moved to a desert house in southern Utah. I thought the five or six mile hikes were a good replacement. Then I stopped the hikes -- too hot, too early, etc. I thought my weekly pilates, yoga, and aerial yoga was enough. I developed all your same health concerns. I had a bunch of tests on a bunch of machines. Then meds prescribed and taken. I was still lethargic and fuzzy headed. I am now feeling better because we acquired an Aussiedoodle puppy -- a wild woman dog who requires a two to three mile walk on the desert every morning. I think I have found my cure...back to that daily workout to start the day. That probably isn't your answer, but thought you should know you aren't alone in the frustration of living actively, eating healthily and not getting rewarded as well as you should be. But, then again, I look at other 80 year olds and count my blessings.

Dana, the sleep apnea, if it is present, has done its damage......sorry. Once your heart finds those extra electrical pathways and gets current going into your left atrium (if we're talking about atrial fibrillation, not necessarily the other arrythmias, of which there are 15), it begins a progressive path towards establishing others over time. You may control your AF effectively with drugs and some lifestyle modification, perhaps for several decades, but the aging body and heart have started even a slow progression toward permanent AF. For me, the idea was to stave off the events of AF until after I die, meaning I wanted to try catheter ablation. It didn't work for me the first time (there's a 25% failure rate of first, or what are called 'index', ablations across the medical practice of cardiology), but the second ablation, same electrophysiologist, worked, and I have been free from arrhythmia for coming up to two years now. The research shows that almost all patients, whether on drugs, self-imposed regimen, or catheter ablation, will eventually succumb to AF yet again. Might be months, might be a decade or more, but the aging heart wants to keep growing the extra node cells in places other than where the SA node is, in the rear roof of the right atrium.

A long way of saying that, while my sleep apnea is very nicely controlled, thanks very much, I still have the disordered heart it made for me. If a surgeon could somehow reverse all the ablation, my heart would immediately begin to fibrillate because the ablation only 'dams' the signal, it doesn't stop those extra electrical cells from issuing their electric current that leaks out into the atrial endothelium. To be more precise, ablation might, and must, kill a lot of those extra cells, but unless the burning goes deep into the cardiac substrate to get all of them scattered here and there, they still exist. And, as I said, the heart now grows more.

So, you'll want to control the apnea if it turns out you have it, and that is a journey all by itself with a new CPAP machine or variants that control different types of apnea. You can get information here, or at apneaboard.com, a forum that I have been on for years now. Great information there if you visit and/or join. But the arrhythmia is another doctor, more visits, more monitoring, more diagnostics, and getting used to more treatment. My own cardiologist wanted a lot of tests for ischemia, meaning low oxygen, to the heart, and I had scads of radiative imaging. I was clean, no ischemia, and all that was left to figure out the puzzle of my AF was the polysomnography. Bingo!

AFTER all that danged radiation. 🙁