Failure to capture

Can someone explain what this means on a EKG monitor?

3 Comments

Will attempt to explain

by Suz - 2015-02-09 03:02:55

Hi there. I have been an ER Nurse for 20+ years and a pacemaker recipient for 3 weeks. I certainly know a lot more about cardiac monitors than how to live with a pacemaker and love this site. To answer your question, "failure to capture" may mean a variety of things depending on the cardiac monitoring system that they're using, however "capture" is not something that a typical cardiac monitor will pick up nor is it likely that it had anything to do with your rhythm. There are two basic assessment elements with a pacer called "sensing" and "capture". Sensing is when the cardiac monitor sees your body's heart rate and kicks in when you drop below your low level limit. Think of it as the pacer "seeing" your rate. Capture is the ability of the pacer to give you enough of an electrical impulse to generate a heart beat. We assess "capture" by feeling the pulse on the patient (arm, neck, groin, etc). This is variable based on the amount of amps that your pacer is set for. So your emergency nurse would evaluate sensing based on pacer spikes on the heart monitor if you dropped below your low level limit and would evaluate capture based on feeling your pulse at the same time. What was more likely happening is that your electrodes on your chest were moving around a bit and it was having a hard time consistently monitoring your rhythm. I wouldn't worry about what you describe unless the doctor or pacer rep said something about it. Good luck. This pacer stuff is scary on this side of the stretcher!

No one else will....

by donr - 2015-02-09 09:02:23

....try, so I will - but first, a question from our sponsor...

What do you mean by an EKG monitor? One of the devices hanging above a bed in an ER showing HR, Respiration & BP? Or something out of a report from a PM Downloading?

I've watched a lot of monitors & never saw one that would know if the PM was supposed to capture & send a pacing pulse. They have all recognized pacing pulses & displayed them, but that seems to be the extent of their PM recognition capability.

Perhaps you are talking about the monitoring capability of the suitcase-sized programmer that they use in interrogations? That, I believe, could give such a message.

Failure to capture means that there was an event in the heart that the PM should have recognized as requiring action, but it did not because either the sensitivity for the threshold where it did capture the requirement to beat was too high or it just plain failed to act for some unknown reason.

Need an answer from you to preclude anything but a pure guess.

Donr

Hospital

by Mommymissy - 2015-02-09 10:02:40

Hi sorry I didn't make it very clear. It was a monitor in the hospital I was there for my other beart issues. I was having some funky rythms but the alarms kept going off saying failure to capture. I wasn't able to get a real good luck at the strip though

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