Since she was a young girl, Sandra Moore, 46, of Glen Ellyn, Ill., had episodes every few months when her heart started racing.
“It was like a light switch turning on,” Moore explained. “My heart would jump from 80 beats per minute to about 200 beats per minute.”
When she was younger and this occurred, Moore could carry on a conversation and pretend nothing was happening. But as an adult, the experience became more intense. Sometimes she covered it up by pretending to tie her shoe while she waited for the wildly beating heart to settle down. It could last five minutes or even as long as 30 minutes, and when it was done, she was perspiring and exhausted.
“I brought it to the attention of doctors quite often,” Moore said. She had her heart examined with electrocardiograph (ECG) in the doctor’s office more than once, but no problem was detected as long as her heart was not racing. Meanwhile, the episodes continued to get stronger. Finally, her primary care physician recommended she wear a Holter monitor, a small, portable ECG device that recorded her heart’s activity continuously for 30 days, while she went about her normal activities. After two tries with the Holter monitor, the abnormal heart rhythm was finally captured on tape, and Moore was diagnosed with arrhythmia.
Millions of Americans have arrhythmia, most of which are harmless, but certain types of arrhythmia can be life threatening, especially in combination with other heart disease. About 350,000 deaths per year in the United States are attributed to arrhythmias.
Moore’s condition was diagnosed as a supraventricular tachycardia, which means that the very fast heart rate was triggered by abnormal electrical impulses originating from her upper heart chambers. It was not a particularly dangerous type. Moore was investigating her options when she had a frightening wake-up call.
While driving in the car with her 9-year-old daughter, Moore felt her heart starting to race. She told her daughter, “My heart is racing, I’m going to pull over,” but the next thing she knew, her car was up on the curb. Moore had briefly blacked out. After that, she knew she could no longer live with this problem and risk endangering not only herself, but also her children or others.
Moore then saw Dr. David Wilber, an electrophysiologist at Loyola University Health System, Maywood, Ill. Physicians at Loyola perform more electrophysiology procedures than any other medical center in Illinois, and Wilber receives referrals for difficult-to-treat arrhythmias from physicians across the nation.
“The heartbeat is controlled by electrical pathways that coordinate muscle contractions,” explained Wilber. “Some people are born with extra pathways, some develop abnormal pathways later in life.
“Arrhythmias can be treated with medication, implantable pacemakers or defibrillators,” he said. “Supraventricular tachycardia can be treated very successfully with catheter ablation.”
In fall 2002, Moore had an outpatient catheter ablation procedure. Through catheters (small tubes) inserted into arteries in the groin area and neck, Wilber used tiny instruments to identify the abnormal electrical pathway in her heart and ablate (destroy) it with high frequency radio waves.