I recently saw a young girl in the ER complaining of her heart beating irregularly. She was in atrial fibrillation. So I thought this would make a great article for this season. You are seeing commercials everyday about this disorder and the medicines that the pharmaceutical companies are marketing for you to choose. It is fairly common and so you should probably know a little something about it.
Most of us walk around in our everyday lives with our heart beating in what doctors like to call “normal sinus rhythm.” That means the sinus node of your heart is initiating each heartbeat as it’s supposed to. In Atrial fibrillation this is not the case as there is chaos in the heart’s electrical pathways causing it to beat irregularly.
A-fib can occur in episodes that come and go or it can be more persistent or it can be permanent. It affects between 3 and 6 million Americans and is the most common dangerous arrhythmia in the heart.
