Loop Recorder

Hello

I am new to this forum, and its nice to have the support with AFIB. I have been dealing with it on and off for a while but, didn't know what it was. I would have episode after mountain biking for and just thought I was out of shape. I had check ups up with my doctor but couln't explain what was happening because it would come and go. Well few weeks ago did a mountain bike ride and it was and I didn't drink enough and had a pretty bad attack, and couldn't get my self to settle down, couldn't caught my breath and decide to call ambulance. They took me to ER and my heart was racing at 160bpm. They administered meds in IV and got me back to sinus rhythm and I went home. Felt okay for a while but symptoms came back within a 1 or 2 and got worse. Met wet cardiologist and he prescribe blood thinner and diltiazem, felt okay buy still symptoms would come and go and then had another attack and went to ER got me back to normal. They check me into hospital and I spent the night and had stress test, songagram of my heart and all looks good. They add flecainide to my prescriptions and haven't had a episode since and been feeling pretty good and have i have been taking easy bike rides,but heart hardly can get over 100.

I decided to have ablation and its schedule for the 28 Oct.2021. I am anxious and nervous at the same time for this procedure.

My question is the Doctor want to implant a LOOP Recorder under skin during the procedure and I was curious if anyone has had this done and what the experience is.

Thanks

I currently have one implanted. As a male, it was fairly annoying for the first little while as any real movement made with the pec muscles you could tell it was there and sore. As most anything else, time heals and it gets less annoying/noticeable. I used to really notice it when doing pushups but not as much anymore.

As far as the usability of it, i didnt use it a lot. In fact the first year of having it in my chest I didnt know I was supposed to have a device that sits by my bedside and takes the data from the loop recorder and sends it to my dr to be analyzed. I have appointments every 3 months and my dr pulls data off the recorder in office and looks at it in my appointments.

These are my pros and cons. I am no Dr so take it with a grain of salt.

Pros:
-Shows overall heart activity. My dr was mostly concerned with the overall trends in resting HR going down and also overall extra activity of the heart trending down as well.
-A constant record of data to your dr. Each month your data is supposed to be reviewed and then talked about in your appointments.

Cons:
-Its not accurate. Obviously its not an EKG so its not going to give you the ins and out but an overall look at whats going on. That being said i found it iffy at best. I mentioned trends because it has a hard time distinguishing runs of PACS/PVCS from AFIB. I have times where my heart gets so many PVCS/PACS it makes me feel awful which in turn the loop recorder just says AFIB. I think one month my recorder said I have something like 394 episodes of AFIB. Not likely.
-Its expensive. Like I mentioned above, I didnt even have the at home device for a year and I would of never requested it had I known how expensive it was to monitor. Granted this depends on insurance and what yours will cover. When I finally got the at home device, I turned it on and set it up. Two months later I got my first bill. It was $150 with insurance for them to "monitor" and read the data each month. I didnt find it useful as I got all the info included with my 3 month checkup and I havent plugged it in since.

I have a touch up ablation schedule in Jan in which they will take out the recorder that was "installed" in 2017. The battery lasted about 3.5 years. If I had to have one put in again, would I? Not sure really. If there was an updated more accurate one, probably. Its nice to see the trend if your heart activity is coming down and seeing where your resting heart rate has gone. But there were also there where days when I would have short runs of what I thought was Afib but when my Dr would look at the recordings, it wouldnt be on there or pushed out of the memory because it only holds so much. It would have been nice to see what was happening that day. So if it was the same one, no probably not.

Sorry kind of rambled there for a bit. Hopefully this helps.

Yes, I’ve had one, Medtronic, for 3 years, just about at the end of its life. It’s is a valuable tool for your Cardologist and/or EP to see what’s going on with your heart.😌

Not sure why you pay to have it monitored. But I’m in Oz so may be different.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/16/2021 03:51AM by JoyWin.