Can a viral or bacterial infection cause arrhythmia?

[tom_h]

Saturday morning, I get woken up with really bad arrhythmia; PAC's, PVC's, and brief runs of tachycardia.  Today the arrhythmia subsides, and I develop a bad case of what appears to be bacterial conjunctivitis in one eye, and general achiness.  It dawns on me that this happened to me about a year ago, same skippiness followed by conjunctivits, but on on a lesser scale.  What do you think? Is it possible the two could be related in some way?

[rilesnic]

I believe arrythmias can be provoked by a virus as well. I have a good friend who now has cardiomyopathy that they believe was caused from a virus and another friend who has a damaged ANS doctors believe is caused from a virus. My ANS friend had to have a pacemaker put in and my cardiomyopathy friend has an ICD.

I've had the flu twice during my adult life. Both times, my PVC's and PAC's completely went away. My HR also fell to the high 50's low 60's for about 10 days both times. My resting HR on a beta-blocker is low to mid 80's normally. I find that when my heart feels sluggish or I just don't feel "heart" right, if I take one Advil, I feel better and don't feel my PVC's or PAC's.

I too believe there may be something autoimmune going on.

[tom_h]

IInteresting.  I've had many year to correlate arrhythma with a subsequent illness.  Before my ablation, I'd get a rash of PVC clusters followed be a cold or respiratory illness with the PVC's vanishing.  Physicians can swear to me that the two aren't related, but it's happened too many time to convince me otherwise.  This recent episode was a doozy, and perhaps was exacerbated by going off Metoprolol at the same time.

[itdood]

This was something I firmly suspected during my horrible flare up back in 2009.  I had 2 kids in day care too.  The flare up started with a viral-like ilness.  It lasted past the original onset.  One of the things I noticed when I was getting these was that I would get really red in one eye as-well.

The realllyyyy wierd part was that a few months into the flare up, I got a regular cold.  As the cold came on, the PVC flare up, about 5,000 per day, completely went away.  For about 12 days while I had this cold, the PVCs were just completely gone.  As the cold went away, the PVCs came back and were eventually at full force again.  I've heard others report that when they get colds or even flu-like the arrhytmias will go away.

It all made me suspect something viral was going on with my heart muscle, or something auto-immune.  

Adenoviruses are known to get to the heart sometimes.  

Coxsackie viruses can also cause viral myocarditis.