My pvc's feel like a dropped beat or a pause in my heart and my pac's feel like a fluttering in my chest & throat. The only way to know for sure if you're having them is a cardiac workup - ekg, 24/hr holter, stress test etc.
If you google causes of pvc's, you'll find tons of causes and things you probably would be shocked could cause them. Hormones, Electrolytes, Lifestyle, Sleep problems, things wrong in your blood levels such as potassium, magnesium, anaemia, anxiety, stress and the list goes on, and sometimes there's no cause.
Are they dangerous? Most likely not, but it all depends on where they orginate, what's causing them and how many pvc's daily you're experiencing. Testing can point a cardiologist/EP to where they think they are originating, but they don't know 100% until they go in and do an EP Study, if you don't have structural heart damage, very symptomatic or a high frequency then they probably won't do one.
I don't want others to think all pvc's are benign, because they aren't. I was told in June/July 2009 that my pvc's were unifocal monomorphic when in fact they were multifocal polymorphic. At that point I had seen 2 cardiologists & 2 EP's for 2nd opinions to be safe that an ablation was for me.
I've been told and read between 1-5% of pvc's are actually something to worry about, and the other 95-99% are benign, how true that is - no clue because in almost 16 months I haven't found proof of this.
Pvc's above 15% of the daily total heartbeat i.e. 15,000 pvc's in the normal 100,000 heartbeats/24 hours can and sometimes do lead to cardiomyopathy, which can be reversible. There are some of us on the heart rhythm forum that have had pvc induced CM and it reverses when the pvc's are ablated.
However, some new 2010 research suggests that very frequent ventricular ectopy (>4000/24 h) may be associated with the development of cardiomyopathy related to abnormal electrical activation of the heart. This mechanism is thought to be similar to that of chronic right ventricular pacing associated cardiomyopathy."
Premature Ventricular Contraction: Follow-up - Mar 11, 2010
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/761148-followup
Here's a post from a CC dr that talks about VT; but addresses pvc's -
http://www.medhelp.org/posts/Heart-Disease/Idiopathic-Ventricular-Tachycardia-Ablation/show/1327314
"The only thing worth assessing is the number of PVC's in a 24 hour period. If it's greater than 15% of all the heart beats than there is a small risk of developing a PVC induced cardiomyopathy. We typically don't ablate PVC's unless they are symptomatic or if they are very numerous (great than 15%)."
What you need to do is get your test results, look them over and if you've had a 24 holter try and pinpoint times you see these are happening and try to find a trigger for yours. A good thing to do my dr's had me do was keep a journal of dates/times/symptoms and what I was doing at the time to see if there's a pattern.
For me, I live with these dreaded things even after lifestyle changes, medications, pacemaker/icd implanted, ablation and followup care - I'm one of the rare ones in the <1% my dr told me - that is lucky enough to be saddled with a diagnosis of "malignant" pvc's (polymorphic VT) they found during my EPS. I went from 50,000 pvc's daily to 0 for a few days after surgery and then slowly they returned a few months after surgery to over 10,000 pvc's daily.
Good luck I hope you find some answers. Let me know if you have any questions or feel free to PM me =)
Lisa