PACs v PVCs

Is it possible to tell the difference between PACs and PVCs ourselves - through taking pulse or how they feel? Or is the only way of determining a difference an EKG?

Nancy

Don't know if it is true, but my Cardiologist, who is a very smart guy, told me PVC's were likely the ones that felt more intense

I can tell the difference - in my case the PVC's are intense enough to be painful sometimes. You can tell that the larger ventricle muscle has "backfired" straining a larger area. The PAC's are like little hiccups and often run like short machine-gun bursts.

I have an EKG machine and the PVC's can cause some pretty radical wave-forms as the event proximity to the EKG leads can vary a lot for different misfiring focus locations - which means different parts of the ventricle muscle are stimulated rather than the top-to-bottom normal progression, thusly straining the adjacent muscle areas around that event.

Either way, you want them addressed by your cardio/EP. I wore a monitor daily for a month (replaceable pads) and what I thought were PAC/PVC's turned out to be skipped beats, especially when Potassium was low. Problem is solved for me by maintaining my Potassium above 4.5 by drinking two large cups of low sodium V8 daily or otherwise taking in about 3g of Potassium supplementation. Be careful not to overdose on the Potassium!

Murray L

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Tikosyn uptake Dec 2011 500ug b.i.d. NSR since!
Herein lies opinion, not professional advice, which all are well advised to seek.

Murray, I found KCl works too to get rid of skipped beats but just now they seem to have been excised using a couple of Magnesium tabs.

I read this on an EPs site -found it interesting as I still get these PACs or skipped beats but they don't (so far) cause AF as they did before. I don't think I ever saw it written verbatim as it is below

[www.afibcryoablation.com]


Dr Walter Kerwin is a cardiologist and electrophysiologist who practices at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He is also Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. His area of specialty is the treatment of arrhythmias, particularly atrial fibrillation, with the use of mapping and ablation technologies.


The other thing that sometimes worries patients is that they still experience extra heartbeats or skips as before the ablation. In fact, before the ablation, it was these skips that started the heart racing. Seldom does the ablation address the spots that produce these extra or skipped beats so they will continue to occur. However, the mark of a successful ablation procedure is that these beats no longer kick the patient into the heart racing. Patients should feel their pulse after these skips to ensure that the heart is not racing. A heart skip that doesn’t turn into a racing heart is a very good sign that the ablation was a success.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/2013 05:12PM by afhound99.