"I went in one morning and they just take a little sharp knife and chop a chunk on you, slip this thing into your chest, put on a band-aid and tell you to go home."Ī monitoring station kept on a counter fed the data captured by Mayer's chip to the hospital, where neurologists analyzed it for signs of atrial fibrillation. Mayer said having the device implanted is a breeze. The implant can track heart rhythm for up to three years, and poses no hassle at all for patients. So two different research teams decided to test whether an implanted device would work better to track heart rhythms. It has a big impact on your ability to exercise, work, those sort of things." "Thirty days carrying an external box with you is really difficult. "They actually hate carrying around the loop recorder," Buck said. They put sticky electrodes on their chest that are wired to the monitor, which constantly records their heart rhythm.īut a month of monitoring usually isn't enough, and patients find the external monitor to be a real pain in the neck, Buck said. Stroke victims usually are given a portable monitor about the size of a deck of cards to tote around for 30 days, he noted. The problem is that atrial fibrillation is a lot like that noise your car makes - you can't count on the noise to occur when the car's being looked over by a mechanic.īuck explained that "the rhythm disturbance can be present for a couple of minutes in a month and then not show up for several months later, and then only be there for a few hours and then go away again." "We know that treating a-fib with anticoagulation reduces your risk by almost 80%." Dawn Kleindorfer, chair of neurology at the University of Michigan Medical School. "We know a-fib is a high-risk condition for stroke," said Dr. If a clot makes its way to the brain, it triggers a stroke. The herky-jerky heartbeat causes blood to pool and clot in the upper chambers of the heart. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Brian Buck, lead researcher of one of the clinical trials and a stroke neurologist with the University of Alberta.Ītrial fibrillation increases a person's stroke risk by four to five times, and at least one in seven strokes are caused by the irregular heart rhythm, according to the U.S. The results represent "a dramatic increase in how often we detected atrial fibrillation," said Dr. One trial showed that the implanted monitor picked up three times more atrial fibrillation than an external device patients have to carry around, and in the other trial it detected six times more atrial fibrillation. Mayer participated in one of two new clinical trials that show implantable heart monitor chips are much more effective at detecting irregular heart rhythms than the external devices now more commonly prescribed following a stroke. It's just there and a part of life."īut thanks to the chip, doctors were able to better track Mayer's heartbeat and adjust his medication to keep him from having another stroke, he said. "You don't even know it's there," said Mayer, the sitting mayor of the Alberta community of Camrose in Canada for the past 32 years. WEDNESDAY, J(HealthDay News) - Norman Mayer, 86, walks around with a computer chip in his chest and doesn't think a thing about it.ĭoctors implanted a tiny heart monitor chip in Mayer's chest after he suffered a mini- stroke in late 2015, to track his heartbeat and potentially detect an irregular heart rhythm called atrial fibrillation (a-fib).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |