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Are ectopic beats dangerous?

What is Ectopic Beats?

Ectopic beats are abnormal heartbeats, which arise from either the top or the bottom chambers of the heart, and these are not your natural pacemaker beats of the heart, so, for example, in a typical 24-hour period, your natural pacemaker generally gives you 100,000 heartbeats in that time period.


Now we would say that ectopic beats that arise from other sites may occur, 50 to say 400 times in that 100,000 cycle, which occurs over a 24-hour period. Now ectopic beats can be felt by patients as palpitations and, for example, the major symptom of an ectopic beat.
Is an extra heartbeat or a skipped heartbeat, and that’s when you feel your heart lurching or when you feel an extra strong heartbeat that only occurs momentarily more rarely.
You get ectopic beats that occur in quick succession, and this would be something like this. Where you have one ectopic beat one normal beat one atopic beat or where you have their topic beats that go maybe four five or six times and then stops and then perhaps two minutes later you get another flurry of ectopic beats that lasts five or six beats And this can be very disconcerting for you and can be the nature of your palpitations.

Our ectopic beats dangerous.

Well again, it depends. Ectopic beats that occur in very low frequency, particularly if they occur in single beats, that is to say one beat and then a normal heartbeat for several minutes and then another heartbeat, which is a topic and then several normal heart beats can be very, very safe.
It can be very disconcerting, though, and you can feel highly symptomatic with this disturbing sensation, that your heart is lurching or skipping a beat now and again, but so long as it occurs in a relatively low frequency and occurs in single isolated beats.
This can be fairly safe and benign. Ectopic beats can be more sinister or dangerous, for example, when they arise from the ventricle or the pumping chamber of the heart, particularly if the burden of the ectopic beats is high.
So what is a high burden? We’Ve studied hundreds of thousands of patients looking at the ectopic beat burden, and it depends really on the individual and what other illnesses you might have on your heart. If you have a structurally normal heart, it is said that anything below 10,000 beats or 10 % in burden over a 24-hour period is typically fairly safe and will not lead to any long-term consequences on your heart.
However, if you have a burden of ectopic beats closer to 50 %, for example, which is coming from your ventricle, then you can imagine that every other heartbeat is abnormal, and that rhythm is also known as a ventricular bigeminy. Now that can deteriorate, your heart pump function. Very rapidly, and if you do have such frequent episodes of ectopic beats it’s worth seeing your doctor urgently.
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