what is cardiac arrhythmia?

Answer 1

It is an abnormal rythm heartbeat. Sinus rhythum is the normal one. SVT, Afib are examples

Answer 2

an arrythmia is caused by a defect in the transmission of the electrical system of the heart. This defect can be caused by the nodes of the electrical system itself, underlying issues with the heart muscle it has to travel through or the conduction system of electrolytes that it takes to 'fire" the spark and enable the transmission along the conduction system.
The bottom line is that the heart is not pumping blood with a normal cadiac output beacause of the arrythmia.

Answer 3

There is special bundle of nerve tissue in the heart that regulates the pace of the heart. If the pace is not steady, it's called arrhytmia.

Answer 4

It is a irregular heart ritme. a heart ritme out of the normal. You want to improve your health all natural for example with breathing?

Answer 5

abnormal rhythm of heart i.e., deviation from normal rhythm is called arrythmia.
the simplest of all arythmias is bradycardia i.e., decrease in heart rate and tachycardia i.e., increase in heart rate .normal heart rate is 72 beats /min.
the examples of complex arrythmias i cant actually explain them are svt.,psvt,atrial fibrillation,ventricular tachycardia ,venticular fibrillation ,and atrial flutter.1st ,2nd and3rd degree heart blocks are also arrythmias.but i would like to mention here that electrocution causes venticular fibrillation and the for arrythmias that are post myocardial infarction lidocaine is the drug of choice.

Answer 6

Ventricular Tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation and heart block

Answer 7

Most of us ask this question here is an article for our colleagues to read including all those on the forum:

Mondays can be rough—especially for one’s heart.

Hearts, like people, know how hard it is to shift gears at the start of the work week, and that’s why people who have an irregular heartbeat—what doctors call a cardiac arrhythmia—are most likely to have problems on a Monday.

Surprisingly, this pattern holds even among retired people. In a 1996 study, researchers from the University of Maryland and the University of Kentucky found that almost twice as many arrhythmias occur on Monday as on weekends; Friday brings a second, smaller peak.


The Human Heart in Motion
"Maintaining a normal heartbeat billions of times is a real feat," said Douglas Zipes, MD, Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Pharmacology, and Toxicology and director of the cardiology division at Krannert Institute of Cardiology at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. "The heart is not a Swiss watch, but a complex biologic system that suffers from occasional hiccups."

The heart is powered by an electrical impulse that signals the heart’s four chambers to contract, each at the proper time. The heart works in an endless contract-relax/contract-relax cycle. An average heart beats 100,000 times a day, pumping some 2,000 gallons of blood through its chambers to the rest of the body and then back to the heart. Over a 70-year life span, that adds up to more than 2.5 billion heartbeats.

But many forms of heart disease can interrupt the normal contract-relax cycle and cause abnormally fast or unusually slow heart rates. Called cardiac arrhythmias, these conditions make the heart pump less effectively, so that not enough blood reaches the brain and other vital organs. When the body’s blood flow is inadequate, the person can faint or suffer chest pain. Even sudden death can occur.

A Half Century of Progress
Today, most arrhythmias are treatable, but just 50 years ago, doctors knew little about why the heart’s rhythm sometimes goes wrong. Back then, an abnormal heartbeat was, for most people, an incurable condition. When a patient complained of excessive fatigue, fainting, and dizziness in 1949, the physician may have suspected an abnormal rhythm after listening to the patient’s heart with a stethoscope, taking a chest X-ray, and performing an electrocardiogram (ECG), but the doctor’s suspicions couldn’t always be confirmed. The arrhythmia usually remained undetected by the technology of the day. Even when the tests did detect a problem, the doctor had few tools to deal with arrhythmias. Only a couple of drugs—digitalis to slow a fast heartbeat and quinidine to return an irregular beat to normal—were available at the time.

A steady pace of new technology and research over the past 50 years has broadened doctors’ understanding of arrhythmias. Today’s heart specialist can offer patients many life-saving treatments.

"The most notable advance in the therapy of arrhythmias was the harnessing of electricity," said Leonard A. Cobb, MD, University of Washington Professor Emeritus of Medicine. "Resuscitation from cardiac arrest was almost unheard of before the 1960s, when cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and external defibrillation started to become tools that could be used almost anywhere. The ability to stop abnormal heart rhythms simply and effectively with an electrical jolt surely must rank among the most significant advances in medical history."

Commenting on how far medical research has progressed since 1949, Dr. Cobb observed, "The prevention of sudden cardiac death due to arrhythmia has become a reality."

Types of Arrhythmias
Arrhythmias stem from several causes. The heart’s natural timekeeper—a small mass of special cells called the sinus node—can malfunction and develop an abnormal electrical impulse rate. Or, because all heart tissue is capable of starting a beat, any part of the heart muscle also can interrupt the electrical rhythm or even take over as the heart’s pacemaker, setting off an abnormal heartbeat. When one of these events interrupts the heart’s normal beat, arrhythmias can occur. Doctors frequently see these five types of arrhythmias—

* Premature beats. The most common arrhythmia, premature beats—which affect a large number of people, especially older Americans—are benign and are often described as "flip-flops." Caffeine and stress increase the occurrence of premature beats.
* Atrial fibrillation. Doctors estimate that 3 to 5 percent of Americans have atrial fibrillation, making it the most common type of problematic cardiac arrhythmia. Atrial fibrillation, which is found most often in people over 65, develops when a disturbance in the electrical signals causes the two upper atrial chambers of the heart to quiver rather than pump correctly. When this quivering occurs, not all the blood is forced out of the heart’s chambers. The blood pools inside the atrium and sometimes clots. Blood clots can cause a stroke if they break off, travel through the body, and block an artery in the brain.
* Bradycardia. A slowed heartbeat, or bradycardia, causes a person to feel fatigued, dizzy, and lightheaded and may trigger fainting spells.
* Tachycardia. Rapid heartbeat, or tachycardia, can also cause inefficient blood circulation. During an episode of tachycardia, a person may feel palpitations, rapid heart action, dizziness, lightheadedness, and may faint.
* Ventricular arrhythmias. The most severe and life-threatening arrhythmias affect the beating of the ventricles, the main pumping chambers of the heart. Ventricular tachycardia is a rapid heartbeat arising in the ventricles. Ventricular fibrillation occurs when the ventricles go out of control, quivering and beating ineffectively, stopping the pumping action. If a more normal rhythm is not restored promptly—within three to five minutes—the patient will suffer brain and heart damage and die.

The Power of Electricity to Help the Heart
Since the 1800s, pioneering researchers have pondered the use of electricity to stimulate a too-slow heartbeat and worked to find methods to deliver an electrical charge to stop fibrillation.

A New York cardiologist, Albert Hyman, MD, invented the first artificial cardiac pacemaker in the 1930s, but its power supply lasted only a few minutes. By 1960, researchers had developed temporary cardiac pacemakers that could be used in hospitals. Those early models had an external battery; wires were inserted through an incision in the patient’s skin and attached to the heart.

Today’s smaller permanent cardiac pacemakers are widely used. The battery is placed just beneath the skin on the chest, and the wires are guided through neck veins into both the atrial and the ventricular heart chambers. Modern pacemakers can regulate a heartbeat for 10 to 15 years on one battery. Most contain a sensing device that turns the pacemaker off when the heartbeat is normal but turns it on and sends an electrical charge when the heartbeat becomes too slow.

Patients with more serious, potentially lethal rapid heartbeat abnormalities have a similar option that has dramatically improved their chances of survival—an implantable cardioverter/defibrillator (ICD). An ICD is inserted surgically, just as a pacemaker is. The ICD constantly monitors heart rhythm, and when it senses that the rhythm is abnormal, the ICD gives the heart a small shock to return the rhythm to normal.

"It is like having an emergency room implanted in your chest," Dr. Zipes remarked.

New Devices to Save Lives
In addition to pacemakers and ICDs, other significant breakthroughs in diagnosing and treating arrhythmias came during the late 1970s and 1980s. The Holter recorder, one of the tools developed during this period, turned the ECG into a portable monitor. A patient wears the Holter monitor all day, and the device records heartbeats and notes when an irregular rhythm occurs.

Although more invasive, an electrophysiologic study (EPS) also measures and studies the heart’s electrical impulses. Using electrodes attached to catheters inserted through veins and into the heart, the EPS can detect almost all types of life-threatening arrhythmias and lead cardiologists to appropriate treatments.

A third tool is catheter ablation. This device returns rapid, irregular heartbeats to normal by using a catheter to deliver radiofrequency energy that destroys a small number of heart-muscle cells. The resulting scar cuts off the route of the extra impulses. This technique has enabled many patients to live a life free of both medicines and recurrent bouts of arrhythmia caused by paroxysmal atrial tachycardia (PAT) or Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome.

Controlling Arrhythmias with Medications
Introduced in England in 1785, digitalis (its modern-day derivative is digoxin) still remains a treatment for fast heart rates caused by atrial fibrillation. Several new compounds developed since the 1950s are used to stabilize the heartbeat or as preventive therapy to avert complications:

* warfarin, an anticoagulant, is used in atrial fibrillation patients to prevent stroke-inducing blood clots;
* antiarrhythmic agents such as amiodarone and sotalol help maintain the heart’s normal rhythm;
* beta blockers such as metoprolol and atenolol limit the stimulating effects of adrenaline on the heart, and slow the heart rate in atrial fibrillation; and
* calcium channel blockers such as verapamil and diltiazem help slow the heart rate and suppress tachycardias.

Answer 8

irregular heartbeats

Answer 9

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiac_arrhythmia