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Innovative Treatment Cures Irregular Heartbeat

In his early 50s, Loren Golden occasionally had unsettling incidents while playing piano for friends and family at special events. “My heart would start to race, and I would perspire,” said Golden, an attorney from Hoffman Estates. A half an hour or an hour of rest was enough to put the incident behind him, and he would forget about the problem. As time went on, though, the problem was harder to ignore.            

About two years ago, he was at a friend’s house when his heart started beating wildly. “It felt like black curtains were being pulled over each eye,” Golden said. “Voices sounded distant.” It was enough to send him to his local hospital for evaluation.

After an EKG, the diagnosis came back: atrial fibrillation. It is a type of irregular heartbeat caused by abnormal electrical activity in the upper chambers of the heart, called atria, or in the nearby veins. The errant electrical signals cause the atria to beat faster than the ventricles, or lower heart chambers, and as a result, blood backs up in the atria instead of being pumped through the ventricles and out to the rest of the body.

The problem actually is quite common. The American Heart Association estimates that 2.2 million people in the United States have atrial fibrillation, including about 3 percent to 5 percent of people older than 65 and 9 percent of those older than 80.

“Atrial fibrillation can cause dizziness, weakness and make exercise difficult. In severe cases, it can lead to progressive deterioration of heart function,” explained David J. Wilber, M.D., director of the Cardiovascular Institute at Loyola University Health System. “Clots that form when blood backs up in the atrium during fibrillation can break loose and lodge in vessels in the brain, causing a stroke.”

Golden tried medication to control his atrial fibrillation but was unhappy with the side effects. Eventually, he was referred to Wilber, a leading electrophysiologist in the Chicago area who performs an innovative new procedure for atrial fibrillation called pulmonary vein isolation. The procedure has been shown to cure more than 80 percent of patients who experience intermittent or persistant atrial fibrillation.

Traditional treatments for atrial fibrillation include medication, a surgically implanted defibrillator to shock the heart back into a normal rhythm when needed, or surgery to remove or isolate the tissues creating abnormal electrical signals.

Pulmonary vein isolation using radio frequency ablation is a relatively new treatment that can be performed in a few hours, while the patient is mildly sedated. Through small incisions in the leg or neck, physicians insert very small tubes into the heart. Radio waves then are used to heat and destroy the abnormal tissue.

Golden was a good candidate for radio frequency ablation considering that he had no other heart damage, such as diseased valves or congestive heart failure. Wilber performed the procedure last fall, and Golden was back to work in only a few days. Now Golden is feeling well and playing tennis twice a week.

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