bumpy roads and chest pain

I have chest pain or afib or something when I ride on bumpy roads. It is very painful and radiates down my arm. Nothing shows up when they check the read out from the pacemaker. I want to know if this is afib or something else. The cardiologist who takes care of the pacemaker says it will not pick up the afib unless it is over 130 bpm. I would like to understand what is happening. Thanks for any help you can give me.

2 Comments

same thing happens to me

by RGHJr - 2013-04-15 10:04:40

I have the same experience but it has been less frequent. I had the same feally while on the lawn tractor. A year ago i was taken by ambulance to the hospital and while ridinv my hearf rate went up. They gave me an iv and did a bunch of tests but didnt find anything. I have been drinking alot more fluids to stay hydrated which seams to help.

Piezo crystal

by golden_snitch - 2013-04-16 03:04:14

Hi!

That sounds very much like you have the rate response turned on, and it works with a motion sensor based on a piezo crystal. A piezo crystal picks up any kind of vibration or shaking, so when you ride a bumpy road, it'll tell the pacemaker that you're moving or exercising, and so it'll increase the heart rate. That's pretty uncomfortable when you just sit in a car doing nothing. Changing the sensivity won't make any difference, since you cannot program a crystal. You could try to re-program how fast the rate response increases the rate, and the upper rate limit, but to stop this reaction completely, you'd have to switch off the rate response.

The pacemaker won't detect this as an arrhythmia since it's only the rate response doing it's job. And, by the way, atrial fibrillation has an atrial "rate" of more than 400bpm, so the pacemaker will always detect that, no matter what the ventricular rate is. It can detect atrial tachy-arrhythmias, and for those the atrial rate is what counts, not the ventricular.

Best wishes

Inga

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