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atrial fibrillation

Irregular Heartbeat Cures: Forget Meds and Rely on this Instead

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I have covered the topic of irregular heartbeats like atrial fibrillation and what you can do to fix the problem in previous articles.

A visit to your cardiologist will leave you with instructions to cut caffeine intake and stress and likely a prescription for a beta blocker and maybe a blood thinner if there is a higher risk of stroke.  Ironically, the beta blocker will increase your risk of stroke (the very thing we’re trying to prevent) and diabetes (which can make a-fib worse).

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Irregular Heartbeat and A-Fib; Surprising Link with Seizures

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The number of patients who have irregular heartbeats is increasing along with every other chronic disease known to man.

While I am not a practicing cardiologist, I did write a book on migraines and epilepsy.  So what does a Migraines and Epilepsy book have to do with an irregular heartbeat??

Quite a bit, it turns out.

You see, migraine headaches and seizures are strongly linked to a problem with the ability of the brain cells to generate energy.  For those of you who stayed awake in high school biology, I’m talking about ATP formation in the mitochondria…

While it may seem contradictory, too little energy in the brain cells will lead to migraine headaches and seizures.  Too little energy leads to brain cells firing before they are supposed to.   In other words, it takes energy to keep a brain cell quiet.  The energy (ATP) is required to operate pumps in the cell membrane (sodium-potassium pumps) and it takes a LOT of it.

Let’s move to the heart.  The heart cells that regulate the rhythm of the heart ALSO require a massive amount of energy to NOT fire.  Think of the heart regulating cells as you pushing a boulder up a hill so you can roll it back down.  Think of how much energy it would take you to push that boulder up to the top.

What would happen if you at McDonald’s for months on end, sat on the couch and stressed yourself crazy and THEN tried to push that boulder up to the top of the hill?  You guessed it—you’d give out somewhere up the hill, but not at the top, and that boulder would roll back down the hill before it was supposed to.

Take this same example back to the heart regulating cells.  The heart regulating cells fire and cause the heart to beat.  But before the next beat, the regulating cells have to gather a certain level of energy before they can fire again, much like rolling that boulder up the hill.

But, if these cells don’t have the energy needed to roll the boulder up the hill, these cells are going to fire before they are supposed to, causing an irregular heartbeat such as atrial fibrillation.  For this reason, anything that beats up the mitochondria (poor quality diets, too many calories, environmental chemicals, emotional stress, etc…) is going to increase the risk of an irregular heartbeat while anything that improves mitochondrial function (fruits, veggies and spices, exercise, mediation, vitamins, low calorie / high quality diet, etc..) is going to support a normal heartbeat.

I have been pushing this concept for several years now and it seems like it’s been slow to catch on, despite the research supporting it.  Just in case there are some of you that think that I’m completely out there and rambling just to hear myself type, I present this particular review.  In it, the author supports my concept, pushing the envelope by scandalously suggesting that antioxidants that support the mitochondria (vitamin E as mixed tocopherols, CoQ10, NAC, etc…) should be consider standard treatment for patients with irregular heartbeats.

Needless to say, after reading this article, I immediately sent the author flowers.

Irregular Heartbeats on the Rise

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Atrial fibrillation. Afib. Irregular heartbeat. Palpitations. It goes by many names. Regardless of what you care to call it, this condition is becoming more common.

I have addressed Afib in the past, outlining how powerful simple lifestyle changes are to help eliminate this condition, but it seems like word is just not getting out. As a result, the rates of people with irregular heartbeat continues to climb. This particular article gives some numbers to illustrate just how bad the problem has become. Here’s what they found:

  • By 2010 there were 33.5 million people worldwide with Afib.
  • Lost quality of life, measured basically as years of health lost, increased by 18.8% in men and 18.9% in women from 1990 to 2010.
  • From 1990 to 2010, the number of people with AF (per 100 000 population) increased in both men and women.
  • Worse, death rates from AFib complication rates increased 2-fold in women and 1.9-fold in men.

The bottom line is that the number of people affected by AFib is going up, while at the same time these people are losing quality of life and dying faster.

Don’t let anyone tell you this has nothing to do with lifestyle. It has everything to do with the choices we make. From stress to lack of exercise to a diet devoid of protective nutrients. If you happen to be one of the lucky ones affected by an irregular heartbeat, AND you’re willing to make some lifestyle changes to make it better, feel free to read through my earlier blog article on this very topic by clicking here.

Irregular Heartbeat: Skip Meds and Try These 6 Steps Instead

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By 2050, 12 million people will have the irregular heartbeat known as atrial fibrillation, treatment of which will cost into the tens of billions of dollars.

For some, symptoms are as minor as an occasional notice of the heartbeat in the chest (palpitations) while for others it can be far more interfering, with symptoms like an irregular or rapid heartbeat, palpitations, lightheadedness, extreme fatigue, shortness of breath or chest pain.  Treatments can range from nothing to medications to control the heart rhythym (usually beta blockers, which will increase your risk of stroke and diabetes) or blood thinners to surgery to burn out the regions of the heart responsible for the irregular heartbeat.

If none of these options sound appealing to you, luckily there’s an easier answer.  But, as a warning, I’m going to sound like a broken record.  But before I go on to sounding like a broken record, let me explain something about atrial fibrillation and how it relates to the way your brain functions (which, having written the book on Migraines and Epilepsy, sort of makes me an expert on the topic).

The cells of the brain function very much like the cells that regulate your heartbeat.  They are heavily dependent on high levels of energy (in the form of ATP) to NOT fire.  Basically, a charge has to build up and build up until it is time for that cell to fire, whether it is to fire off a brain cell or the heart muscles.

Just like improving chronic migraine headaches or improving seizures in epilepsy, the key is to stop doing things to damage your mitochondria (the part of the cell that makes the needed ATP) and start doing things to improve the way your mitochondria function.  Which brings us back to this particular article.

In it, researchers put people with atrial fibrillation through a series of lifestyle changes, many focused around weight loss, to see how this had an impact on atrial fibrillation.  The lifestyle changes consisted of a very low calorie diet (800-1200 calories / day) using a complete meal replacement product (Prima Health Solutions, Kickstart) for 2 of the 3 daily meals for 2 months.  Overall the lifestyle program focused on 6 simple tenants:

  1. Calorie maintenance 800-1200 calories/day
  2. Low glycemic index foods
  3. High mono and poly unsaturated fats based foods
  4. Low saturated fats, cholesterol and sodium based foods
  5. Alcohol reduction (less than or equal to 30g/week)
  6. Initially 3 x 20 minute sessions of low intensity exercise per week (usually walking), slowly adding in 1 – 2 moderate intensity session(s) per week (jogging, brisk walking, swimming, cross-trainer, rowing machine, cycling)

So what happened to the participants that followed the diet compared to controls that just received general lifestyle advice?

  • Lost more weight (about 24 more pounds).
  • Atrial fibrillation symptom burden scores were lower (11.8 versus 6 points lower).
  • Atrial fibrillation symptom severity scores dropped lower (8.4 versus 1.7 points).
  • Number of episodes dropped by 2.5 per week.
  • Cumulative duration dropped per week (692-minute decline versus a 419-minute increase).
  • As a bonus, there was a reduction in interventricular septal thickness (a sign of less stress on the heart).

Not too shabby of an outcome, especially when you look at the number of minutes per week; basically the group that made the changes had a pretty hefty 18 HOURS less of atrial fibrillation per week.  With studies like these starting to accumulate, the idea of merely managing an irregular heartbeat with medications or a “wait and see” approach (notice that the control group had an increase of almost 4 hours per week over the 15 months of the trial) is a bad idea.

Lifestyle changes are a must for this type of irregular heartbeat.  But, then again, I did warn you that I was going to sound like a broken record.