Pacemaker Club: Active Heart Rate

Active Heart Rate

by enjoy_jer
2018-08-23 16:18:19
Complications
1337 views
1 comments

I have had my pacemaker since 2016, and to my knowledge, have had this issue the entire Life of my pacemaker:

My Pacemaker is set, only to maintain a Resting Heart Rate of 60 BPM. I did not think this was supposed to have any affect on the active rate.

I have always been a fairly active perain. However, after a long recovery, it seemed that I was not seeing any improvement getting back into shape. Consequentially, I began keeping track of my Health data, and realized that my Heart Rate does not increase with activity, never rising above 60 BPM resting Heart Rate.

Is this normal? Is something screwed up in the settings? Is there usually an upper limit, or is the Pacemaker supposed to assist in increasing the Active Heart Rate?

Thank You

1 Comments

settings

by Tracey_E - 2018-08-23 16:29:30

Why do you have the pacer?

If you have it for av block, then your sinus node (in theory) works normally. It sets the pace and the pacer works by making sure the ventricles beat when the atria does. This is when the upper limit is important, the pacer can only pace up to the upper limit.

If you have sinus issues, where the atrial rate either slacks off or doesn't go up on exertion, the pacer works by kicking in when you go a second without a beat (assuming a lower limit of 60, or one beat per second).

So that's upper and lower limits. Then there is everything in between, going up on exertion. If your rate does not go up on exertion, the pacer can be programmed to help with that. Most of them are based on movement so if the pacer senses we ae moving, it raises our rate for us. It's possible this is not turned on, or if it's on it's not sensitive enough. It's not uncommon to turn it off unless we need it. Sounds like you need it but they won't know if you don't tell them. Call your doctor and ask to be seen. It may be helpful to get on a treadmill while on the pacer computer so they can see what's going on real time and adjust the settings accordingly. We are all different and no two of us are programmed alike, so it can take a few tries to get it fine tuned.