You or someone you know likely has atrial fibrillation, or AFib. It’s estimated to affect 1 in 22 Americans, according to the National Institutes of Health, and its prevalence is growing.
Now, a revolutionary treatment system is changing the conversation about care for this serious cardiac condition.
“It is the most common heart rhythm disturbance we encounter,” said Dr. Ricky Henderson, an electrophysiologist with AnMed Arrythmia. “Up to 30% of us in our lifetime will experience it. If we ever have any other heart condition like heart failure, then that number jumps to up to 50%.”
What is AFib?
AFib is a progressive disease that occurs when the heart’s upper chambers beat out of rhythm. As a result, blood is not pumped efficiently to the rest of the body. It affects nearly 60 million people worldwide and is associated with serious complications, including heart failure, stroke and increased risk of death.
About half of those with AFib will have heart palpitations or rapid heartbeat. Some will have shortness of breath or fatigue with exertion.
“If they don't have palpitations and they don't have any of the other symptoms, many of those people first present with their first stroke,” Dr. Henderson said.
Treating AFib with ablation
Treatment for AFib has shifted dramatically – and for the better – in recent years. Dr. Henderson said that 15 years ago, doctors would try multiple medications to suppress AFib and to protect patients from stroke. Important progress in treatment happened when ablation, which started in 1998, came to the forefront of patient care.
It is now the frontline treatment for AFib, with medications used only if necessary.
As technology has advanced, the success rate of suppressing AFib with ablation has increased, along with safety and patient recovery time. Dr. Henderson was one of the first in South Carolina, and the first in the Upstate, to use the new Medtronic Affera 3D Mapping system to treat AFib.
“Ablation modifies the heart’s electrical conduction system to keep the electrical impulses of our heart in the areas of normal heart muscle and not leak into the areas where we know that the AFib lives,” Dr. Henderson said. “Ablation simply channels all of these impulses away from those particular areas.”
Ablation treatment has advanced from heating or freezing tissue–the only options for years–to pulse field.
“Pulse field allows us to effectively kill those conduction cells in a manner that doesn't introduce any risk to any surrounding tissue,” Dr. Henderson said. “It delivers a radio frequency energy in an ultra short burst, only 150 milliseconds or .15 seconds.”
That causes electrolyte shifts in the tissue, without injuring the surrounding area, providing a much more efficient way to treat the condition.
A trailblazing advancement in AFib treatment
The Medtronic Affera 3D Mapping system provides another leap forward in patient care.
“It’s a combination of a mapping system – a way that we can actually see these electrical impulses on the internal lining of the heart – and it’s combined with a Sphere-9 Catheter,” Dr. Henderson said. “The catheter is a mesh of electrodes. We can put it somewhere, do our pulse field ablation, and then move it a little bit and do more ablation.”
The Sphere-9™ Catheter is an all-in-one high-density (HD) mapping and dual energy ablation catheter, with both pulsed field (PF) and radiofrequency (RF). Dr. Henderson said the system pairs the mapping and ablation in one single catheter for increased precision and patient safety, since it does not require switching between mapping and ablation catheters, which can increase risk.
“It has been nothing short of fantastic,” he said. “Patients are going to like it because it’s much less time under anesthesia, and it’s all done with much less discomfort, because we don’t cause inflammation with this technology. It’s just a win-win-win all the way around. It is absolutely remarkable.”
Dr. Henderson said having access to this treatment in Anderson is a “feather in AnMed’s cap.”
“AnMed has led the way in many, many ways, and this is just one more way that not just in our region, but in the country, we’re keeping it on the leading edge,” he said.
