racing heart - Heart Disorders Message Board

sjde · 01-15-2005, 06:41 PM

My college-age daughter has had 3 episodes of a racing, pounding heart in the last 2 years. It lasts about 5-10 minutes. She feels light headed and the time it happened and I was with her , she had a heartrate of 180-200. The other two times it happened during exercise. The doctor thinks it's SVT-super(supra?)ventricular tachycardia, but unless it's caught in progress on an electrocardiogram, he says they can't be sure. He doesn't seem too concerned. He told her to do carotid massage or to bear down to stop it. Isn't 5-10 minutes a long time for something like this to last?

Sue

jpos · 01-16-2005, 02:18 PM

I heard that you should not attempt carotid massage unless you are trained. The bearing down is a vagal maneuver and may work. You can request a holter monitor, it is a monitor that takes continuous ekg for 24 hrs. If she doesn't get it often you can look into an event monitor, it works a bit different and is usually used for a month, but can be longer or shorter. If she is symptomatic I think it should be checked out. Just my opinion.

KarenBeth · 01-16-2005, 04:15 PM

I heard the same thing, that only a professional was suppose to do a Carotid massage, because you can overdo it and slow the heart rate down too low. . . I would over question that.

It's not odd to have a 5-10 min episode of SVT, they usually last anywhere between 5-15 minutes for small episodes.. does she drink any caffeine, or anything like that?

sjde · 01-17-2005, 01:08 PM

She used the event monitor but nothing happened while she was using it. No, she doesn't have much caffeine. Her grandfather used to have a rapid heartbeat like that too.

Sue

Kitten1980 · 01-17-2005, 02:27 PM

If she only has them very rarely (as seems to be the case), and she isn't having other symptoms, and there is no underlying physical defect that is causing it... then the options are quite limited.

Did she see an actual cardiologist or a primary care physician? This *does* need to be evaluated by a cardiologist.

I'm assuming that she had an EKG and the monitors and nothing else abnormal showed up? That in itself can go a long way towards putting your mind at ease about the whole thing.

However, if two of the three times it's happened, it was exercise related... a stress test may be in order - and if she's really lucky, she'll have an episode on the treadmill and they can catch it then, and you'll both know what's causing it and what can be done about it (or if anything at all needs to be done).