MANY PVC

[gopo92]

Can anyone tell me why having many pvc per day can lead to cardiomyopathy???
I am suffering from many per day and I am very scared. Plz ans the above question..

[RNRita]

"Premature ventricular contractions (PVC) in the presence of a structurally normal heart are commonly encountered in clinical practice, their long-term prognosis has often been considered benign. Interestingly there is a school of thought that PVCs can cause deterioration of the left ventricular function analogous to tachycardia-induced cardiomyopathy."
This is from a really good article about reversal of this condition.  However, you must have a LOT of PVCs a day for this to happen.  Some here get thousands (I have had periods of this) and never get cardiomyopathy.  In other words, it is not common.  You should ask your cardiologist if you have an enlarged ventricle, because if this happens, they will try to treat with ablation which is highly successful.  

[gopo92]

Thankfully my echo was completely normal. But why does it deteriorate the condition of the heart??? It is just a forceful beat is not it????

[Mom2four85]

If you go to the expert forum, you'll find lots of information from the Cleveland Clinic and Medhelp doctors. There's a heart disease forum and 2 heart rhythm forums with lots of questions & answers from the doctors here and will explain in great detail sometimes some of these questions.

The CC dr here explained this: "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 (greater than 15%)."   http://www.medhelp.org/posts/Heart-Disease/Idiopathic-Ventricular-Tachycardia-Ablation/show/1327314

There are no quick & easy answers as to who gets CM and who doesn't from very frequent pvc's - there are so many things that come into play with the heart.  Things like - where your pvc's originate, (morphology) pvc numbers, what the other parts of your heart are doing and how that is affecting your overall heart health. Since you had a clean echo, it's doubtful anything else is going on, you need to find your triggers and figure out what's causing yours - lifestyle, environmental and possibly something lacking in your system such as magnesium could be making yours worse.

What happens with pvc induced CM is the heart muscle weakens and the vast majority of the time it reverses when the pvc's are treated or ablated.  In 18 months I've only seen 3 or 4 cases of CM from those of us with very frequent pvc's, in all but 1 case reversed.

You should get a list of all of your questions you've asked in the members community and ask your dr or go to the expert forum here and ask so a dr or cardiologist can answer these questions =)

Pvc's can be very scary if you let them, it's great to educate yourself BUT don't read more into symptoms and research than you need to. Also, take into context the research - many times it will be done in a VA setting where the patients were older and already had things wrong with their hearts, which would make problems seem worse or developed symptoms that happens during the natural aging process.

Here is some useful info, if the links don't work - most of them are in my journals:

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/761148-overview

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/761148-followup

http://eurjhf.oxfordjournals.org/content/8/8/869.full

http://heart.bmj.com/content/95/15/1230.full

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/761148-diagnosis#lown

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC482587/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC482587/pdf/brheartj00184-0097.pdf

[gopo92]

there is not really an easy way to get a holter monitor test in my city. So how can I find out how many pvc I have???

[Mom2four85]

I'm confused, I thought you had a holter or other monitor testing already? if they did an echo, why didn't they do a monitor first? what brought about the need for them to do an echo but skip a monitor? alot of things can be caught on a holter or other monitor, so I'm shocked that wasn't done first - you can't really know what's going on unless you have this test done

call your dr or another cardiologist/ep and ask about having one done; I'm not sure how it works in your area; but that's the way it's normally done here; unless you ask for it and pay for it out of pocket