Pacemaker Club: Pacemaker / Defibrillator

Pacemaker / Defibrillator

by pabrya1
2011-06-13 10:06:51
ICDs
1972 views
1 comments

Hello all, I am new to the site and would like some feed back about pacemakers/defibrillators. Last week we were informed by my father's doctor that his heart is only working at 5% and there is nothing they can do for him besides putting a defibrillator in. When the procedure was explained to us by his assistant she stated that the same peice of equipment that they put in for a defibrillator can be programed to work as a pacemaker as well. But my father is only getting the defibrillator portion.

I have been doing some research online on pacemakers and of what I have read that pacemakers is for patients with weak hearts. Is this not so?

Thanks for any feedback.
Patty

1 Comments

pacing

by Tracey_E - 2011-06-13 11:06:27

All ICD's come with pacemakers built in. Sometimes when the icd fires the heart needs help getting started in a regular rhythm again so the pm is there if needed. It will always be there as a back up to pace if the heart rate drops too low, whether the icd fires or not. I don't know what she'd be talking about unless they just didn't bother with the leads that go to the pacer part, but that would be silly, imo, and I've never heard of doing that because the pm backup serves a function when the icd fires.

A pacemaker helps a slow heart, not a weak one. If the heart beats too slowly, the pm generates a pulse to cause a beat, but it's up to the heart to contract and make that beat. If his ejection fraction is 5%, that means it's not contracting very hard when it beats so adding beats probably would not help. Normal EF is 50-60%, which means when the heart contracts with a beat, it pushes out x% of the blood that's in the heart.

There is a condition where the left and right ventricles beat out of sync and EF drops. In that situation, a biventricular pm can sometimes help by synchronizing the ventricles, but again, that will only help if his problem is lack of synchronization.

If there is nothing else they can do and his ef is only 5%, I would question why they want to put him through the icd. It will restart his heart if it stops but it won't make it beat more efficiently, it won't give him better quality of life and there's no guarantee it would even work if it fired as weak as his heart is. It's not a bad procedure, but if it were my parent, I would probably say no thanks, or at least get a second opinion before doing anything. Just my opinion based on the little you've told us, take it with a grain of salt. ;)

Good luck to you and your dad.