Each year, more than 120,000 Americans have defibrillators implanted in their chests to give life-saving shocks, but sometimes the devices go off for the wrong reasons, and point to a more serious heart problem.
What does it feel like if one of these defibrillators fires? My patients often describe a “shock” from their defibrillator as a bomb going off inside their chest. For most patients, they would gladly exchange a very short and intense burst of pain for extra years of life.
My colleagues and I recently asked the question, What does it mean to a patient and their family if a defibrillator goes off? Today, the results of our large study were published in the leading Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
In this study, we looked at what happened in 3,809 patients who received a shock from their implantable defibrillator. We then compared the outcomes of these 3,809 patients to 3,630 matched defibrillator patients who did not receive a shock.
The results of our study were really quite striking. Here's what we found over the three-year follow-up period of this study:
- If the shock were to end a cardiac arrest (ventricular fibrillation), patients were 2.1 times more likely to die over the next three years.
- If the shock were to stop ventricular tachycardia, patients were 1.7 times more likely to die over the next three years.
- If the shock was from atrial fibrillation, patients were 1.6 times more likely to die over the next three years. It should be noted here that defibrillators are designed not to deliver a shock for atrial fibrillation. However, if the atrial fibrillation is fast enough it can “fool” the defibrillator and a shock will be delivered.
- If the shock was for a very fast benign arrhythmia or a device malfunction (the device was “fooled”), there was no increased risk of dying.
SOURCE: John D. Day, MD, Everyday Health