You’ve been having these strange sensations in your chest. You’ve taken your pulse and you’ve felt the skips. The jumps.
You’ve called your doctor and he’s run any number of tests, from as little as a stethoscope to your chest to as much as an ECG, Holter monitor, event monitor or echocardiogram.
And then he prescribes an SSRI for you, which sounds fine at the time because what do you know about acronyms and what medications treat which conditions. But you like to know what you’re being told to take and how it might affect you, so you Google SSRI.
Hmm. Serotonin reuptake inhibitor? That’s a drug for the brain, right? And it’s an antidepressant. The doctor thinks I’m depressed and that’s what’s causing my arrhythmia?
Now you feel worse than you did before you saw the doctor. Not only is he not addressing the cardiac issues, he’s trying to pigeon-hole you as a simple worry-wart and mollify you by filling you full of “happy” pills.
Before you go into a tailspin, Googling all the terrible things that might (but in all likelihood will never) happen to you by leaving your primary symptom untreated, please read on.
It’s true that SSRIs like Zoloft and Prozac are antidepressants. They’re also used as anti-anxiety medication, too, and for those of us who suffer from benign heart rhythm abnormalities, they can be a godsend.
What Do SSRIs Do? Do They Work?
Without getting overly technical, an SSRI is designed to help stimulate synaptic cells in the brain by keeping the neurotransmitter serotonin at the surface of a synaptic receiving cell for a longer period of time. The result of this stimulation, as you might expect from a drug called an antidepressant, is to make a person less depressed, or put another way, more happy. Less anxious.
And if stress is a concomitant factor in your arrhythmia, this may be exactly the thing you need to wrangle control of your health and well being back from the brink.
Stress can be a cagey animal. It hits some people long before an upcoming, worrisome event. It hits others during the event. Still others it affects after the event. For some the stress grows little by little, every single day. Just like an animal you feed each day, it grows a bit here and there, but it happens so slowly that you never realize how big it’s become until it’s snarling in your face, demanding all of your attention. And throwing your formerly metronomic heart into fits and quivers.
SSRIs can help you fight this stress animal by keeping your worry and anxiety at manageable levels and maybe even allow your mind to return to a time when your life was simpler. When the weight of the world wasn’t on your shoulders, worrying about your job, mortgage, kids, parents, neighbors, coworkers, spouse and all the rest.
Because SSRIs affect brain chemistry slowly, it takes awhile for them to take full affect. Pharmacists will tell you it’ll take 2-3 weeks and even after that initial “break-in” period you may continue to improve over the following months. And once the stress is wiped away, often times so are the palpitations, skips and spurts.
So don’t dismiss your doctor as an uncaring and self-absorbed just yet. Give your SSRI a few weeks before you decide. It may be just the thing you need to treat your arrhythmia.
To be able to understand the term pulseless electrical activity (PEA), it’s important to first recognize the difference between a tactile pulse and the indication of a heartbeat on an ECG tracing. Just because it appears that the heart is beating as it should on an ECG does not necessarily mean blood is being pumped throughout the body. It simply means that the electrochemical signals sent out by the sinoatrial node are propagating throughout the heart and being captured by the ECG machine.
Being able to feel a person’s pulse means that blood is actually being pumped; when you place your fingers on the inside of your wrist, you’re feeling the rush of blood being pushed through the artery by your heart’s contraction.
Also known in ECG terms as a flatline, asystole (pronounced ay-SIS-tuh-lee) is the absence of any discernible activity in the heart. While asystole may be considered an arrhythmia, this arrhythmia is characterized by a complete lack of rhythm, patterned or otherwise. During asystole there is no blood being pumped through the body’s organs and no electrical or mechanical activity occuring in the heart..