Palpitations

[blueocean1961]

50 year old female.  Have had PVC's and PAC's 20 years.  Stressed to max about having these.  I usually get 10 - 20 a day where I feel a heart zap or a flutter or a pause and a thump.  I had a holter which showed nothing and I had stress test which showed 2mm depression so they did a nuclear stress test with the dye injected which checked out a-okay and was told that lots of people have these irregular beats and not to worry as I have a normal heart and said there are a lot of females that have positive false results.  Should I pursue this further or just forget about all these irregular beats I get?

[Mom2four85]

my heart's normal also....on some days...some days not so normal; so I gave up trying to figure out what the heck's going on...I've had arrhythmia's and fainting since age 9 and was told nothing was wrong until age 42 when I found out my heart's normally not so normal and I have Obstructed Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy and malignant arrhythmia's called polymorphic ventricular tachycardia.

dr's say in a "structurally" normal heart; arrhythmia's really are nothing to worry about unless they get very numerous >15 - 20% of your total daily heartbeats or about 15,000+ and/or very symptomatic with fainting, dizziness, lv dysfunction etc; but even with fainting and arrhythmia's dr's told me there was nothing to worry about up until July 2009.

there was a lady at my last cardiologist who had 80,000 pvc's daily; treated only with beta blockers and no structural problems - made my 50,000+ pvc's, nsvt, pac's and psvt runs seem small compared to hers

at my peak I was having 37 pvc's per minute...days on end for about a year; before that I was in bigeminy for quite a while; thankfully I'm down to about 10,000 pvc's and about 1,000 pac's daily now...

I would try to find what triggers I have; environmental, lifestyle or body wise; which could be anything and eliminate them to see if it helps.  research pvc causes and see if anything comes to mind - caffeine; stress, sleep problems, hormones, imbalances etc

[dmacd74]

If you had the nuclear stress (which is like a super stress test), you are fine.  Time to work on the anxiety - which is sometimes harder to do than the arrhythmia!  I have had 17K per day for a top number, lately it has been about 7 - 8K per day.  My heart checks out as normal.  I try not to worry, you should too.

[bbxx]

Agree with curmudgen

[curmudgen]

Wow - only 10-20 per day... some folks on this forum get 1000's per day.  As long as you do not have any heart disease and cause no other symptoms (eg. fainting) you should be okay.  They sure do startle you at first and you think your heart is going to stop, but relax and take a deep breath and continue on.  Anxiety tends to increase them and they are hard to forget.  Scroll through the forum or search internet for lots more information.