You run up a flight of stairs and it feels like your heart is thundering in your chest. Or, your heart flutters and flip flops in your chest for a few minutes, out of the blue. Both of these are examples of heart palpitations — one that's harmless while the other might indicate a more serious cardiac issue.
As a symptom, heart palpitations can be tricky to figure out, which is why heart-health expert Dr. Madaiah Revana and the team here at Humble Cardiology Associates want to focus on the subject in this month’s blog post.
An average heart beats about 100,000 times a day, which is a whopping 35 million times per year. For most of these heartbeats, you’re unaware of the activity as your heart quietly hums along, delivering oxygen to your body.
When you become aware of your heartbeat, this is what we refer to as heart palpitations, and this awareness can be caused by perfectly mundane things, such as:
As you can see, these are harmless situations in which you become aware of your heart’s activity, which can range from fluttering to pounding.
As benign as heart palpitations often are, they can also signal some serious problems with your heart, starting with the most serious — a heart attack.
When someone has a heart attack, they can develop:
If you’re experiencing heart palpitations and any of these other symptoms, and they’ve come on suddenly, dial 911.
Outside of a heart attack, other heart conditions can lead to ongoing issues with heart palpitations, such as arrhythmias. An arrhythmia is an irregular heartbeat, and the most common type is atrial fibrillation (AFib), which will affect more than 12 million people in the United States by 2030.
With AFib and other arrhythmias, you can feel sporadic heart palpitations that feel like fluttering, skipping, or pounding. These palpitations occur because of irregular or chaotic electrical activity in your heart that causes the chambers of your heart to beat out of sync, placing you at more risk for serious heart disease.
Heart palpitations can also be caused by valve problems in your heart, as well as other issues like heart failure.
If you’re experiencing heart palpitations and there’s no obvious cause for them, we want you to come see us for an evaluation. This is especially true if you're feeling more fatigued than usual and a flight of stairs leaves you breathless.
After reviewing your symptoms, we will perform a number of tests, including drawing your blood and doing an electrocardiogram (EKG), which measures the electrical activity in your heart. We may also set you up with a Holter monitor, which does the same thing as an EKG, except you're hooked up to the portable device for 24-48 hours.
Even if we find that your heart palpitations aren’t heart-related, you can narrow your investigation moving forward and get some peace of mind about your cardiovascular health.
If you’d like to get your heart palpitations evaluated or you have more questions, please schedule an appointment with us at one of our two offices in Humble or Houston, Texas, by clicking here.
