Atrial Fibrillation: The case of Patricia | IDOVEN

Patricia's case was a challenge for us; nonetheless, we have analyzed, studied and resolved her atrial fibrillation.

Patricia could be considered a semi-pro athlete. She has spent her entire life in sports, from rhythmic gymnastics to swimming (she swam across the Strait of Gibraltar in 2015), passing through medium-distance triathlon and mountain biking.

For several years, Patricia had felt discomfort in her heart when her pulse reached high rates during training and competitions, highlighting several periods in which her heart remained pumping at 180-190 pulsations after a strenuous activity.

Before putting herself in our hands, Patricia had already tried everything: stress tests, traditional holters, magnetic resonance of the heart ... and none of the tests had found a solution. This uncertainty about her heart caused Patricia to withdraw from competing because she couldn’t find an answer to the problems she had.

Before going into detail on how we discovered Patricia’s heart problem, we want to explain her athletic background.

Key points:

• Close relative with atrial fibrillation at age 55: She has a close family history.
• High-intensity sports practice for 14 years: Weekly sessions of more than 12-15 hours (sports cardiologists consider more than 13 hours per week as high performance). She has completed Ironman competitions, crossed the Gibraltar Strait in 2015, won the Madrid-Segovia in MTB in 2018...
• Personal stress from 2018
• February 2019: heart rates of 197 beats per minute maintained for 40 minutes and occasional palpitations during exercise.

With these variables and the analysis of the sports holter that she wore, we started looking for a "Why?" to her situation. 

Our work:

During this 10-day cardiac monitoring, we analyzed 759,131 heartbeats and cardiac adaptation to different types of physical activity, including competition and training. Her heart rate during recovery after exertion, throughout the day, and during sleep was also studied.

We detected some relevant arrhythmias responsible for the symptoms she described:

• Supraventricular tachycardias during races, some of them with atrial fibrillation criteria.
• Ventricular extrasistols (advanced beating of the ventricles) and two episodes of non-sustained ventricular tachycardia, one of which coincided with the symptom diary event referred to as "heart flip" on 8/10 at 17:05h.
• Severe nocturnal bradycardia at 39 beats per minute (physiological sinus bradycardia indicating good recovery).

After the medical study supported by artificial intelligence and assessment by our team of cardiologists, we came to the following conclusion and solution of the problem:

Since this is a symptomatic athlete with arrhythmias who needs the most optimal treatment, we recommended an electrophysiological study and ablation of symptomatic atrial fibrillation.

The objective of IDOVEN is to eliminate risks and resolve situations that can put the lives of our patients in danger so that they can continue exercising at all levels. This is why Patricia has donated her heartbeats in order to continue saving lives with our technology.

#donateyourheartbeats                                

If you want to know what we can do for you, write to the following contact: contact@idoven.ai