BTW Here's an ECG from my Apple Watch showing 3 such beats (you can't miss them): https://link.ekin.dev/l1Vc3Gdf
If you happen to have these, just get checked out by a cardiologist. They are almost always benign but the frequency / daily amount are reasons for concern.
These have COMPLETELY gotten rid of my ectopic beats and also helped me deal with the health anxiety.
If you ever want to talk, feel free to hit me up (contact info in profile).
I think they've even recently found use in cancer therapy [1].
Sir James Black the pharmacologist who developed it is an absolute legend [2].
1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2162402X.2023.2...
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPe0sLghRBQ&list=PLVV0r6CmEs...
I’ve had an echo, stress ecg and then a ct angiogram. Everything is physically fine so at this point I mostly ignore them cause at least I know they are not an immediate danger.
Thanks!
I get ectopic beats when I've got trapped gas in the stomach. Sounds weird, but generally when I get them I realize I need to stand up (because I've usually been sitting with bad posture which leads to the trapped gas) and have a large belch and then it calms down. I mentioned this to my doc and he said it was Roemheld syndrome ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roemheld_syndrome ) which is vagus nerve-related.
The thing about arrhythmias is that they can only cause damage while they're happening, but ectopics are only a problem for a single beat, which is not going to impact your oxygenation or blood pressure or anything else. Even a bunch of them every day won't cause any damage.
This. Some of us have very high levels of proprioception. I can feel my pulse just by sitting quietly - I don't need to put my finger on my wrist to take it. Same with ectopic beats, I definitely feel them. And I find that there's a cycle to it - as you say there's a feedback loop: feel ectopic beat, become anxious, more ectopic beats, more anxious, etc. Then I have to try to actively forget about them. During those feedback times I'll have many ectopic beats / day (many per hour, even), but then some days later I'll realize I haven't had any for a while and I might go for weeks without noticing any.
I had 2 24 hour monitors and one caught 700 eptopic beats in a day. Another couple months later, 15.000 in a day. The second one was a concern for the cardiologist. She ordered a couple more tests, started beta blockers asked for diet changes.
I still have a high burden as I can feel them but whatever..
From time to time I get episodes of sudden tachycardia¹. It's a very strange feeling: one second everything is fine, the next my heart jumps in my throat and starts beating at 230 bpm (not a typo). After a while, just as quickly as it came, the tachycardia goes away and I'm back at whatever HR I was before the trigger. If it doesn't go away by itself, breathing in deep and holding my breath typically does the trick. It's like a light switch! A bit scary, but also very fascinating.
Thanks for explaining so well what goes on "under the hood"!
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paroxysmal_supraventricular_ta..., I believe.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/wolff-parkins...
I had just plain vanilla Afib and got ablation 2 years ago - best thing ever, cured instantly.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/wolff-parkins...
I have the same bouts of tachycardia. They are very intermittent, no real cause. And the same breath holding technique works for me. Very interesting stuff!
To cut a long story short, I went to hospital (instead of that meeting) and it turned out that it was atrial fibrillation and that while it feels medium terrifying it's not necessarily that big a deal.
It went away after a couple of days (if it had lasted longer they'd have done "electroconversion" to try to get it back into the proper ryhythm artificially). Apparently the real danger of this is that it might cause a blood clot which in turn could cause a stroke, but it's unlikely to be an issue in the short term.
They did put me on blood thinners and beta blockers between the occurrence and getting a full check up a month later, so I was very calm when we rescheduled that meeting.
Top tip: don't ignore a terrible headache; go to bed.
Edit: PS I think my heart rate was just above 100bpm at rest (possibly 120?), which was unnerving enough, so I can imagine how much more scary 230bpm must feel! You definitely win.
Woke up on the ground feeling very relaxed. Got a medical workup that checked a lot of things, they had me wear a Holter monitor for a month. In the last 30 minutes of the study period they caught five bad heartbeats of A-Fib when I was sleeping. Funny one of my evil twin's schemes went south around then and I (we?) were feeling really bad about it. My cardiologist told me that the threshold was one bad heartbeat so I have A-Fib and have a risk of strokes, he recommended that I take a baby aspirin as it has a mild blood thinning effect.
Around the beginning of the next year I developed a deep vein thrombosis which got cleared up with Eliquis, a blood thinner. The emergency room referred me to my primary care doc who ran all sorts of tests and couldn't find a reason for the DVT so he decided to keep me on Eliquis indefinitely, the cardiologist figured that covered the A-Fib so I dropped the aspirin because the combination could cause excessive bleeding.
I have one of those credit card Kardia EKGs and haven't seen an A-Fib episode yet. For the decade before I got that workup I did crazy amounts of cardio (helped me stay sane under incredible pressure) and around the time my evil twin was out I was getting up in the morning before sunrise, hiking 6 miles, going to the gym during the day, going out in the evening and hiking another 6 miles. My cardiologist says I have "Athlete's heart" with an abnormally low resting heart rate (drops below 50 at night when I get a good night's rest) and I shouldn't do more than an hour of cardio a day, so I don't.
I also want to make a similar article, where I calculate an ECG for the simulation, and then make and explain the changes necessary to make the ECG look realistic. A main challenge will be that the depolarization has to happen very fast relative to the repolarization, which may be computationally difficult for a cell-based simulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_wave
because cardiac cells circle around a loop with phase from 0 to 2π, contrast that the usual oscillator which has position p and momentum q. An oscillation in that space can rotate around the center and look like a phase but it's also possible to go right through the center, whereas for cardiac excitations the p variable is on the unit circle. This astonishing book covers the topology of this kind of thing:
https://archive.org/details/geometryofbiolog0000winf/page/n9...
particularly the cases where you have just one phase (e.g. jet lag or cell division or plant phenology) but it applies as well to those spiral waves where every element in the medium has a phase.
The ablation was quite the experience as I was kept conscious throughout (and I felt euphoric thanks to the painkillers). A team of students carefully threaded a wire in through my femoral artery, guided it up to the inside of the heart and zapped the problematic cells. I could actually feel the moment they fixed it. One moment my rhythm was irregular, the next it was regular. They then ran a series of stress tests that included injecting me with something that pushed my heart rate above 200 bpm. That was uncomfortable. I was back to my normal routine 24 hours later and I did indeed have more energy.
If I'm fast enough, the wave can't spread to the grey cells so it only goes in direction around the red cells and starts a loop.
(But you can't do this on the first image with a Defibrillate! button because there are no slow cells.)
In 2000 the Computers in Cardiology challenge (CINC2000) provided ECGs from sleep studies of 70 patients and asked contestants to identify obstructive sleep apnea based on those ECGs. I was on the team that won.
Now I am reworking the problem for the second edition of a book (see https://www.fraserphysics.com/book.pdf), and I see great variety in those ECGs (see https://www.fraserphysics.com/all_ecgs.pdf). I suspect that some of that variety is due to lead placement, and some is due to pathology, but I'm not sure.
Is anyone here willing to help me out?
I wonder what other types of cells / tissues can be simulated by cellular automata?
RD was invented by Alan Turing as a way to model animal coat patterns too, and I think it's exceptionally good at that (I did a talk at Houdini Hive SiggraphAsia2019 about it: https://youtu.be/K_7TkoIkFhk?si=afhcjZ8TeysNJxRH)
It's wild how many different types of arrhythmia there are, and how they can be connected to many other systems in the body. It seems like mine might be related to my nervous system.
I've survived ventricular fibrillation 3 times and have an implanted ICD. I never really understood why delivering high voltage shocks is that effective, and always have anxiety about "the time it won't work"
I'm a medical doctor with an interest in engineering and coding. My PhD was quite focused on signal analysis and coding, and my supervisor is a medical engineer.
Any suggestions?
