What Causes Them, and What Should Be Done About Them?. Heart palpitations — an unusual awareness of the heartbeat — is an extremely common symptom. Most people who complain of palpitations describe them either as “skips” in the heartbeat (that is, a pause, often followed by a particularly strong beat) or as periods of rapid and irregular heartbeats.
Key Points
While many people with palpitations can ignore them, others find them extremely disturbing and frightening, and often worry that they are about to die at any moment. Fortunately, the vast majority of palpitations are not associated with life-threatening heart rhythm disturbances.
When you tell your doctor you are having palpitations, it becomes his or her obligation to do two things:
- identify the cause of your palpitations,
- provide you with the best advice for treating that cause.
Heart Palpitations
Most people with palpitations have some type of cardiac arrhythmia. Virtually any arrhythmia can cause palpitations, but the most common causes of palpitations are premature atrial complexes (PACs), premature ventricular complexes (PVCs), episodes of atrial fibrillation, and episodes of supraventricular tachycardia (SVT).
However, in some cases, palpitations can be caused by more dangerous arrhythmias, such as ventricular tachycardia.
Life-threatening arrhythmias are usually seen in patients with underlying heart disease, so it is especially important to identify the cause of palpitations in individuals who have underlying heart disease or who have significant risk factors for heart disease (such as family history, smoking history, high cholesterol, being overweight, sedentary lifestyle).
Not all people who report palpitations have heart arrhythmias.
The same sorts of symptoms can be caused by musculoskeletal problems or gastrointestinal disturbances, such as gas.
How Palpitations Should Be Evaluated
If you have palpitations, your doctor’s first order of business is to find out whether the palpitations are caused by a heart rhythm disturbance. If so, he or she needs to identify the particular arrhythmia that is causing your symptoms.
This should be relatively straightforward to do, so it’s surprising how often doctors seem to have trouble with it. The trick is simply to record an electrocardiogram (ECG) at the time the patient is having symptoms. That’s it. Not exactly rocket science, is it?
Don’t Let These Mistakes Happen to You
Doctors commonly make two mistakes in their attempt to determine the cause of palpitations:
- They often miss the arrhythmia that is causing them.
- And they often attribute the palpitations to an arrhythmia that is actually not causing them.
The doctor will order an ECG (which records the heart rhythm for only 12 seconds) or a Holter monitor study
(which records the heart rhythm for only 24 hours), and during this period of monitoring, the patient will not have either palpitations or an arrhythmia. All too often, the doctor will then inappropriately conclude that the palpitations are not related to an arrhythmia.
Worse, the doctor may tell the patient that the symptoms are “all in your head.” Actually, the doctor’s workup was just inadequate.
To make a correct diagnosis, the palpitations and ECG must occur at the same time. If the palpitations occur only intermittently, and especially if they do not occur every single day, instead of doing an ECG or a 24-hour Holter study, the doctor should order an event recorder study.
The event recorder study can continuously record the heart rhythm for weeks at a time – however long it takes to “capture” an episode ofpalpitations. It’s really quite simple – record the ECG for as long as it takes for the patient to have an episode of palpitations, then look to see what the heart rhythm is during the palpitations.
The doctor will see an arrhythmia during monitoring that is not associated with palpitations, and blame the palpitations on that arrhythmia. This is wrong. To say an arrhythmia is causing palpitations, the arrhythmia and the palpitations must occur at the same time. Once again, monitoring must continue until palpitations occur
so that the heart rhythm can be examined at the time of the palpitations.
Since doctors frequently make these two mistakes, it is important for you to keep in mind this simple rule if you have palpitations: To make an accurate diagnosis, an ECG must be recorded at the very time the palpitations are taking place. If your doctor thinks the workup is complete before this has been accomplished, then you must redirect his or her efforts through gentle reminders, guile, appeals to reason,
righteous indignation, or whatever it takes.
Treating Palpitations
Appropriately treating palpitations depends entirely on which arrhythmia is causing them. Once you have your diagnosis, you can read here about the treatments available for the specific arrhythmia that is causing it.
