Are their alot of members who get palpitations.Am 9 nine mths post op and get them every day for a few seconds.it really gets me down doc says stop worrying.Sometimes seems worse when I eat.The drugs I am on are concor 2.5mg and ecotrin.
It's anecdotal, but it seems to be pretty common for valve replacement patients. I've heard AT LEAST 30% get it post surgery.
Embedded in this recent article is a good summary of the two main causes of afib. How my doctors explained it to me was that even if you haven't had afib before surgery, the trauma of the surgery can set up an inflammation in the atrial area during recovery and can trigger afib issues (often temporary with proper treatment).
http://my.clevelandclinic.org/heart/news/hot/caffeine-in-afib.aspx
"There is no one ‘cause’ of Afib. Rather, Dr. Baranowski explains the condition generally develops in one of two basic scenarios.
The first is in the presence of significant heart disease, typically leading to an enlargement of the left atrium, which is the chamber from which atrial fibrillation originates and is maintained.
“An overly simplistic explanation is that this enlargement or stretching of the chamber pulls apart some of the heart’s own ‘natural electrical wiring,’ leading to a short-circuit and rapid disorganized electrical firing within the atrial chamber – or atrial fibrillation,” Dr. Baranowski says.
There are many conditions associated with the development of left atrial fibrillation, he says. These include long-standing, poorly controlled high blood pressure, coronary artery disease and previous heart attacks, valvular heart disease, previous open heart surgery, nonischemic dilated cardiomyopathies, diastolic dysfunction, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and congenital heart disease.
The second way Afib develops is in patients who have no evidence of structural heart disease, which is also referred to as “lone atrial fibrillation,” Dr. Baranowski explains. “We tend to assume that these patients have a genetic predisposition to developing this arrhythmia, as the conduction properties and manner in which the electrical impulses are handles within their hearts is abnormal and prone to short circuiting.”
Typically, when patients are first diagnosed with Afib, the episodes start and stop on their own – called paroxysmal Afib. But as the disease progresses, Dr. Baranowski says, the abnormal rhythm tends to become more persistent or permanent – patients tend to remain stuck in atrial fibrillation.
In patients with paroxysmal Afib, there may be associated triggers that kick the patients into the abnormal rhythm. These triggers may include stress, fatigue, infection, surgery, exercise, obstructive sleep apnea and possibly stimulants, such as pseudoephedrine, cocaine and caffeine. "
