Posted 3/26/2016 12:48 AM (GMT 0)
My wife was diagnosed with afib and mitral valve regurgitation while traveling. I'm new to this disease and trying to understand heart rate. Her cardiologist tried one cardio conversion that failed, and has her on beta blockers before trying it again. We have an iphone app that takes her afib rate and it has come down from the 150s to the 110s over 10 days with the meds.
But her pulse rate taken by the blood pressure machine is between the 60s and the 80s. I assume that the afib rate measures the electrical activity and the pulse rate measures the actual blood pulses through the veins. When people talk about afib heart rate, which heart rate are they talking about? And which is the one to be careful about?
Also, we need to follow up with a mitral valve surgeon in the northern Virginia / DC/ Maryland area when we get home. If anyone has a name of a surgeon or center we'd love to have it. I've done a lot of looking through the internet and tried the obvious, Johns Hopkins, Washington Medstar, etc, and I find a lot of heart surgeons but not necessarily those who operate on mitral valves, a lot of them do aorta valves.