The biomedical market’s latest technology for treating irregular heartbeats has made its way to the Flathead Valley, bringing with it a promise of abbreviated, low-risk surgeries.
Atrial fibrillation, known as AFib, is a kind of irregular, rapid heartbeat and the most common form of arrythmia, affecting an estimated five million Americans today, according to the American Heart Association.
Possible symptoms include heart palpitations, shortness of breath, fatigue, or dizziness. If left untreated, blood begins to pool in the atria, the upper chambers of the heart, causing the excess clotting with overload. These clots can potentially wind up pumped out of the heart to the brain, blocking the brain’s blood supply and causing a stroke.
AFib treatment normally involves thermal ablation therapy, a procedure that uses extreme heat or extreme cold to cauterize the heart tissue cells causing the irregular heartbeats. Attached onto these procedures, however, are several risks, including potentially damaging the esophagus or damaging and paralyzing the nerve that runs from the diaphragm to expand the lungs.
In April, Logan Health Medical Center began offering FARAPULSE™ Pulsed Field Ablation (PFA) procedure, one that skirts around the traditional thermal ablation by using high-frequency electrical pulses to locate and eradicate the bad tissue.
The PFA procedure uses short, electrical pulses to target the heart’s myocardium, the muscle layer that is responsible for the erratic heartbeats.
It has about the same effectiveness as thermal ablation in preventing future occurrences, Logan Health electrophysiologist Dr. Matt Brunson said, but the key improvement lies in risk management.
“It actually significantly reduces the risk of major surgical complications,” Brunson said. “Mostly because it reduces the change of collateral damage to non-cardiac tissue.”
Developed by biomedical engineering firm Boston Scientific, the procedure limits the amount of time needed to operate in the left upper chamber of the heart, lowering the risk of stroke during the procedure, and a faster recovery time.
As the only full-time electrophysiologist in the Flathead Valley, Brunson said that on average he performs over 100 AFib ablations per year, making up for about 40% of all his ablation operations, of which there are several. Generally, he’s operated on AFib using cryoablation, the use of extreme cold to freeze the infected heart cells.
Since Logan Health began offering the new procedure in April, Brunson has already performed five operations with the new technology.
“There’s a high demand for it,” Brunson said. “It’s been great so far.”