Treatment Options for Cardiac Arrhythmia

Cardiac arrhythmia, or an irregular heartbeat, occurs when your heart beats abnormally fast or slow. This may only affect a portion of your heart, or it can involve your entire cardiac muscle. In some cases, an arrhythmia can prevent the brain from receiving enough oxygen-rich blood, eventually leading to stroke. Other times, it can put so much stress on your heart muscle that you suffer from heart failure. Thus, it is important to treat heart arrhythmias swiftly and effectively.

First, it is important to understand what controls your heartbeat. There are two special nodes in the heart muscle that generate tiny pulses of electricity. These electrical pulses serve as signals that tell the heart muscle when to contract. The heart contains four distinct chambers, so it must contract in exact synchronization to keep you blood flowing properly. Because the heart is so reliant upon electricity, many different types of cardiac arrhythmia treatments rely on electrical therapy.

Bradycardia, or a slow heartbeat, often occurs as a symptom of an underlying condition, such as thyroid trouble. So, when you treat the underlying condition, bradycardias often disappear. However, some abnormally slow heartbeats are not caused by another issue, and doctors must instead implant a pacemaker near your heart. Pacemakers emit electrical pulses to stimulate the heartbeat, much like the natural electricity-producing nodes in your heart.

The other form of cardiac arrhythmia is tachycardia, or an overly fast heartbeat. Initially, doctors and therapists may teach you to use vagal maneuvers to stop the arrhythmia. Vagal maneuvers include coughing, holding your breath and straining, and other techniques that help restart and resettle your heartbeat. If those do not work, you may require anti-arrhythmia drugs which help you avoid abnormal heartbeat episodes.

For more critical tachycardias, you may need cardioversion or ablation. Cardioversion involves resetting your heart with electric shock therapy. With ablation, doctors locate the sources of abnormal rhythm in your heart, and they insert catheters next to these areas. They can either heat or freeze the tips of the catheters to destroy the abnormal areas of tissue. This can help restore a regular heartbeat.

Although cardiac arrhythmia is often inexplicable, it can develop as a result of powerful medications, including YAZ, Yasmin, and Ocella. If you now have an abnormal heartbeat due to taking YAZ, Yasmin, or Ocella, you should contact a YAZ lawsuit attorney from Williams Kherkher today at www.yasminbirthcontrollawsuit.com.