- Thank you for visiting this video segment for Dr. AFib.
I'm Dr. Morales.
In today's video segment,
we're going to be talking about shortness of breath
and why does atrial fibrillation make you
feel short of breath.
So there's many ways in which atrial fibrillation
can make somebody feel short of breath.
And so I'm going to go over a few of those examples.
Shortness of breath is a very common symptoms
that people describe when they're having episodes
of atrial fibrillation and it's very common
that people who are in AFib,
consistently feel more short of breath.
So why do those things happen?
One, it's just the heart rate by itself,
the heart rate by itself.
You can imagine people who have atrial fibrillation
who are not well controlled, may have elevated heart rates.
They may be controlled when they're just sitting down,
not doing anything, but with a little bit of activity
the heart rate may can become very fast.
120, 140, sometimes even faster than that.
There are patients who are even when they're
just sitting and resting the heart rate's
going to 100 to 110.
So you can imagine that your heart rate's going
very fast a lot.
It's like as if you're running all the time
and you can imagine when you're exercising,
your heart rate gets up and
you feel short of breath.
And these people feel this way all the time.
So sometimes just the heart rate by itself
can make a person feel short of breath,
but another, what about people who have
a controlled heart rate?
Does the AFib also affect shortness of breath
when somebody has a controlled heart rate as well?
So what are the ways in that that can happen.
One is just the atrial fibrillation by itself.
In atrial fibrillation that upper chamber
of your heart is just sort of quivering.
It's not really squeezing properly that the way
the upper chambers of the heart should,
and so your heart loses some of that efficiency
and that certainly can contribute to some
shortness of breath.
In addition when people are in AFib consistently,
very commonly the pressures inside of their heart
can be elevated compared to somebody
who is not an atrial fibrillation,
and those elevated pressures then get transmitted
to the next nearest organ, which is the lungs,
and that's when people start getting fluid in their lungs
or what's another type of diagnosis called
congestive heart failure.
And so that extra pressure from people
when they're having atrial fibrillation
sometimes can then transmit to your lungs,
gather fluid in your lungs
and then cause shortness of breath.
And whether somebody has elevated pressures inside a heart
can be best diagnosed with an echocardiogram.
Echocardiogram can evaluate the overall function
of the heart as well as the pressure inside heart
to know if atrial fibrillation is contributing
to the elevated pressures inside of the heart.
Now if you are consistently in atrial fibrillation
and that's affecting some shortness of breath,
one of the ways in which it can be managed
probably the most straightforward is to
get out of atrial fibrillation.
There are many ways to get out of atria fibrillation
such as a cardioversion, which is an electrical shock
to your heart to get out of atrial fibrillation,
and then also in ablation procedure
where you go in through your groin
to try to make strategic burn marks
to try to get a person out atrial tribulation.
Now not everybody is a candidate
to have these types of strategies done.
Not everybody is able to get out of atrial fibrillation,
and some people who attempt these types of procedures
they end up going back to the atrial fibrillation.
So what about people who don't really have
an option to get out of atrial fibrillation?
Are there ways to help control
their shortness so breath?
First would be to control the heart rate
and secondly would be to control the pressures
inside of the heart.
It usually involves diuretic medication,
fluid medications such as Lasix or other types of diuretics
and that could certainly help
with the shortness of breath.
So those are several ways in which
atrial fibrillation can affect shortness of breath
as well as treatment strategies
in order to help try to improve somebody
who's experiencing shortness of breath.
Thank you for visiting this video segment for Dr. AFib.
I'll see you next time.