So dear wife is in a waiting status. First need to replace Aortic Valve then can get an ablation. In the meanwhile AFIB is being treated with 100 mg Metopolol and Tikosyn.
She has self-converted several times since the Tikosyn was started (mid-March), and her most recent run of NSR lasted just shy on a week.

She went to lunch with a friend and within minutes of eating Chinese food (Sesame Chicken) she felt her Afib startup. When she got home I told her that the last time she had Chinese she slipped into Afib for several days.

Once might be a coincidence, twice starts to make a case for trigger event.

So I found the following:
Case study .

So my question to the forum: Is Chinese food triggering Afib a common or frequent finding?

This is from many years ago, a compilation of things people did successfully to reduce their afib. See Fran Ross's story starting on p 4 of the pdf: [www.afibbers.org]

[pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]

[woman.thenest.com]

,,,and interestingly:

[www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]

I had an episode from breathing bleach toilet cleaner once and now avoid it, so I think anything can happen. I've discovered all kinds of crazy triggers over the years, most of them from food.

Lying on my left side and turning a wrench did it to me twice.

Msg is a trigger for me.
I avoid chinese and thai food.

But how many of those triggers were just coincidence? Remember, every time you go into afib you were doing or just did something.

I noticed a correlation with MSG, so I avoid it as much as possible. It's hard to tell sometimes, because I eat out at times, but I don't buy anything to bring home with this as an ingredient.

Consuming caffeine is a 1:1 guaranteed AF episode. even small sips are enough.

lisa
__________________________

So much of medicine is looking solely down the wrong end of the gun barrel, and that is really a pity for all of us---Shannon

While I haven't researched this (just speculation), I would venture to guess that 50% of all afib episodes just happened and there was NO trigger.

You can spend a lifetime searching for and eliminating possible triggers and you will still have afib episodes. Maybe fewer or maybe not.

@Cary at el
Sure, it may be a coincidence that twice dear wife has had a Afib episode immediately after eating chinese. Billions of people probably do not have a sensitivity to high levels of MSG. It just seems that for my wife, the prudent thing would be to try to avoid MSG.

The case study I cited in the original post referenced a patient being subjected to a MSG challenge to see if afib could be provoked, and suggested that for that patient, MSG did provoke Afib,

On the other hand, the dear wife consumes (to my mind) copious amounts of coffee, and suffers no ill effects, go figure!

Just goes to show that each one of us has some level of uniqueness. I just wondered how "out-of-the ordinary" an MSG sensitivity might be.

I have no doubt it's very individual, but I always think back to my experience with MSG. I became convinced that it was a trigger for me after two incidents of afib immediately following a Chinese lunch. So to find out for sure I went to the store and bought some "Accent." Accent is really just pure MSG. So I went home, dissolved a teaspoon of it in water, and drank it. Nothing happened. So a day or two later, I repeated the experiment but this time using a full tablespoon of MSG, which is a whopping dose. Again, nothing happened. So I threw the Accent away and happily continued eating Chinese. It was much later that I did discover the trigger. It was simply a big, hearty lunch followed by just sitting at my desk. The cuisine didn't matter, only the size and heartiness. So I learned that if I took a 30 minute walk after eating, that eliminated the trigger.

Your wife might not be willing to risk triggering an episode, but that comes down to how much she wants to continue eating Asian food. At least for me, giving up things I enjoy is almost as harmful to quality of life as afib itself is. I've met people who've given up dozens of things they enjoy because of a single afib episode. You can find posts like that here.

Hi, I was diagnosed with AF some 40 years ago so I have had plenty of time to look at causes. My conclusion, (in my case), is it's not just MSG, it's MSG in combination with another stimulant like alcohol or caffeine.
I can even enjoy a Chinese meal if I don't drink alcohol or one of the Chinese teas that contain caffeine.
I even eliminated 'decaffeinated' tea from my diet because it is not caffeine free, just reduced!
Most manufacturers these days are moving away from MSG to Maltdexterin which they don't even have to list in the ingredients because they have had it classified as an emulsifier! For me maltodextrin is just as bad as MSG and the hide it in ingredients like Worchestershire Sauce Powder. Sounds harmless but contains maltodextrin.
Cheers,
Phill,
P.S. I have found that for me, even small amounts of maltodextrin seem to build up over a day of two. I try something that sounds harmless and eat the same amount for a couple of days and it catches up with me.