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Showing posts from September, 2020

Living with Atrial Fibrillation (AFib)

  In a healthy heart, the rate and rhythm of the heartbeat are controlled by an electrical system. A series of coordinated electrical signals start in a part of the heart called the Sinus Node. The electrical impulse then spreads across the heart and tells it when and where to contract, or squeeze. This synchronized heartbeat continuously circulates blood from the lungs, through the heart, and out to the rest of the body to deliver oxygen. In people with   atrial fibrillation --also called AFib--the electrical signals are abnormal, and largely chaotic, and cause the heart's chambers to beat irregularly, and often rapidly. If you have been diagnosed with AFib, you are not alone. AFib is the most common type of irregular heartbeat, and an estimated 2.7 to 6.1 million Americans are living with AFib. Some people with AFib never experience symptoms and are diagnosed when a healthcare professional detects an irregular heartbeat. It's estimated that one-third of Americans who have AFi

What causes supraventricular tachycardia?

  So super ventricular tachycardia comprises of atrial flutter AV nodal, reentrant, tachycardia and AV reentry, tachycardia, also known as the wolff-parkinson-white syndrome, and if we talk about the latter two, which is the AV NRT and the WPW syndrome, the cause of this typically is an additional pathway that You’Re likely to have been born with so this is an abnormal structure in your heart that is unlikely to go away on its own, and the only treatment really to get rid of this pathway is through a catheter ablation approach. Where we’re going through your groin and look for this abnormal connection or structure in your heart and get rid of it typically by delivering some heat onto the structure, to destroy it? Well, it depends now, if you have symptoms very often, and the symptoms that you get from the very high heart rates that you get with an SVT, make you feel like passing out or indeed make you lose consciousness and, for example, whilst you’re driving. Then, of course, it can b

Electrical system of the heart | Circulatory system physiology

  Here is a diagram of the four cavities of the heart. To begin with, let's name them. We have the right atrium up here. Down here is the right ventricle. We have the left atrium and the left ventricle. These are the four cavities. And the blood will flow through all of them, and then it will come out to the body. To do this and do it right, the heart must coordinate its contractions. And we know that way to shorten is that you have a cell and this cell is usually negatively charged. And at some point it will become more positively charged. And we call this process depolarization. Depolarization is the process of transition from negative membrane potential to a much more positive value. Depolarization is when a muscle cell can be shortened. Where does this start? Let's draw it in our diagram. If you look, there's an area here, in which small cells can depolarize on their own. And it's pretty unique because most of the cells in the body will depolarize when an adjacent

How the Heart Adapts to Exercise

  So my research focuses on examining how the heart adapts to exercise, specifically how the heart enlarges due to exercise. We see that in people who exercise vigorously - cardiac chambers become enlarged and the heart muscle thickens, also known as left ventricular hypertrophy. We're interested in two things: One is to better understand the mechanisms of left ventricular hypertrophy due to exercise. The thought is that if we can better understand the mechanisms of this process we might better understand how exercise might be used to benefit people with cardiac disease. There's also a more direct clinical application of my work. So a common scenario in our clinic is that an athlete presents either because they have symptoms or because they've had some abnormal findings on cardiac exams and they're found to have heart muscle thickening or left ventricular hypertrophy and it's not clear whether that's just due to their exercise or due to some pathologic process.