Your doctor can determine if you have atrial fibrillation, but there are also several innovative ways you can monitor your own heart rhythm at home.
you think you might have an irregular heartbeat, a smartphone app may be able to tell — but you can check your heart rhythm on your own in other simple ways too.
Sometimes an irregular heartbeat like atrial fibrillation (afib) isn’t detected until the person has a stroke or heart failure. Monitoring your heart rhythm on your own through traditional and new, more innovative methods, and then discussing your findings with your doctor can be helpful for diagnosis. Your doctor may then order additional tests, either in the office or at home to confirm a case of afib.
Why Afib May Be Tough to Detect
Normally, the heart contracts and relaxes in a steady rhythm. If you have afib, your heart’s two upper chambers quiver or contract in an irregular way. As a result, blood isn’t pumped properly into the heart’s lower chambers.
When this happens, you may experience a number of troubling symptoms, including:
•A rapid and irregular heartbeat
•Fluttering or pounding in the chest
•Dizziness
Other symptoms of afib may be less obvious, such as weakness and fatigue. Complicating matters, some people with afib have no symptoms at all, saidHugh Calkins, MD, Immediate Past President of the Heart Rhythm Society and director of the clinical electrophysiology laboratory at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
“You can have afib all the time and be completely unaware of it,” Dr. Calkins said. “For people who are completely asymptomatic, afib may not be picked up until they have a stroke or heart failure.”
5 Ways to Monitor Heart Rhythm
There are several ways to monitor your own heart rhythm. The method you use will depend on how often you experience symptoms and how comfortable you are using different medical tools or devices.
Some methods, like the classic two-finger pulse test, are traditional; but today there are also some more innovative methods available, like smartphone apps that can accurately monitor your heart rhythm and help detect the presence of afib no matter where you are.
1. Pulse Check
To check your pulse, place the second and third fingers of your right hand on the edge of your left wrist. Slide your fingers to the center of your wrist until you find your pulse.
While taking your pulse, it’s important to realize that you are checking your heart rhythm, not your heart rate.
Rather than counting the beats, check for a steady, regular rhythm, Calkins advised. Not all people find it easy to check their pulse, Calkins cautioned, perhaps because of anxiousness.
2. Stethoscope
Your doctor may use a stethoscope to monitor your heart rhythm. This is something you can also do at home, Calkins said. “Patients can buy a $20 stethoscope and listen to their heart to make sure it’s beating nice and regularly or if it’s jumping around,” he said. For some people however, using a stethoscope may be difficult, triggering the same sort of anxiety that’s associated with a pulse check.
3. EKG
Although you may detect an abnormal heart rhythm by checking your pulse or listening to your heart, the only way to confirm an atrial fibrillation diagnosis is to get an electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG) from your health care provider. That’s considered the “gold standard” and most reliable way to diagnose the condition, according to Calkins.
During this test, electrodes are placed on your chest to pick up the electrical impulses that cause the heart to beat. These impulses are sent to a screen or an EKG strip. Your doctor will examine the pattern of these impulses and determine if you have afib.
In order for an EKG to pick up afib, however, you must be having an episode during the test. This may work well for people who’ve had persistent afib for many years. But, if you have occasional afib episodes, also known as paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, an EKG may not pick up an irregular heartbeat.
“It can be like catching a fox in the hen house,” Calkins explained. “It can also take years to go from intermittent to persistent afib.”
4. Holter or Event Monitors
If your afib episodes are sporadic, your health care provider may give you a small electrocardiogram device known as a Holter monitor to wear. It records the electrical activity of your heart for as long as you wear it, typically for a few days. Using wireless cellular technology, the device then sends the recordings to your doctor’s office or a company that interprets the data.
If your afib episodes are very infrequent, you may need to use an event monitor. This device is similar to a Holter monitor, but it’s activated only once an episode begins.
5. Smartphone Apps
Smartphones provide another way for people to monitor their heart rhythm. “Now there are applications you can put on a smartphone that are personal EKG monitoring systems,” Calkins said. An example is the free app AliveECG, by AliveCore, Inc.
A study on one of these apps, published in the journal Heart Rhythm in 2013, found that the application could accurately detect an irregular pulse in people with afib by analyzing signals recorded with an iPhone 4S.
Calkins noted that heart rhythm apps also could prompt people to see their doctors. “Patients should be aware that although their heart rate varies, their heartbeat should be regular,” he said.
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