Dizziness & pressure after heart surgery

[Yolanda-Knaszak]

Posted By  CCF CARDIO MD-sc on October 13, 1997 at 14:37:11:

In Reply to: Dizziness & pressure after heart surgery posted by Yolanda Knaszak on October 01, 1997 at 17:59:27:

: i am a 78 yr old female-I had an aoritc aneryism (sp?) removed and replaced with a cow's valve at CCF in November 1996. I am currently taking 2.5 coumadin/0.25 linoxin/25m captropil/20 m furosemide/120m cardizen/20meq potassium/i have been getting sever dizzy spells & pressure across my forehead/I had a cat scan done and have seen a sinus doctor to no avail.I feel great otherwise.But I get unsteady on my feet and feel like I may fall when I walk.Any help you may give will be appreciated.thank you.

[CCF Cardio MD sc]

Dear Ms Knaszak
There are a number of conditions that can cause the symptoms you are experiencing. It is impossible for me to go into all of them so I will try to focus on the more significant and likely ones. First of all the dizziness you are experiencing may be due a fall in your blood pressure. You are on a number of medications that may lower your blood pressure and if you take these medications at the same time their additive effect may be to much. One way to confirm this would be either to check your blood pressure when you are experiencing these symptoms or even better to get a continuous blood pressure monitoring device which can give you trends in your blood pressure rather than instantaneous readings. This mechanism can be excluded relatively easily by these methods.
A more important mechanism that could  cause your symptoms could be cardiac arrhythmia’s ( irregular heart beat ). There are a variety of different cardiac arrhythmia’s and the way to exclude these would be to get an ECG during one of these spells. Unfortunately if these spells occur intermittently you might not be able to do this, in this case what would be recommended would be a Holler monitor or an event recorder which can monitor you heart rhythm for long periods of time, and in the case of an event recorder will start to record when you trigger it to do so. This not only enables you to diagnose a rhythm problem but may also exclude one if the rhythm is completely normal during one of your spells. These I think are the two most important cardiac mechanism for your symptoms. There are possibly more non cardiac causes for your problem which I will  not go into now. What I suggest is that you again refer to your doctors for a complete evaluation if your symptoms continue to be a problem . I hope that this will be of some use to you .  If you would like to return to the Cleveland Clinic for this evaluation please feel free to call 1-800-CCF-CARE for an appointment. Information provided in the Heart Forum is intended for general medical information only. Actual diagnosis and treatment of any particular medical condition can only be made your family physician(s).