ICD Questions and Answers

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can anyone who experienced an ICD shock describe to me how they felt and dealt with their first shock? I a, new to this club and fearing my first shock. I'm a male in my late 30s

Regards,

Shidoshi

ICD_Support said...

Thank you for your question, Shidoshi. I have referred this to the pacing clinic staff and also put on social media. As soon as I have a answer, I will post on this page.

Unknown said...

Hi Shidoshi,

Having a shock is not a problem or any pain ( not to me anyway?)
The worry that have concerns me is why have I had a shock, what reason i.e life style, medication,ICD etc.

Sorry to be a pessimist, but no one tells you this at the beginning

Kind regards

John Tester

ICD_Support said...

Hello Shidoshi and John,

I've never had a shock but I've certainly seen hundreds because I test the defibrillators when they are being put in. From my observation, the shock is a short-lived jolt in the chest.

The muscles of the chest do contract with the shock and so for more muscular patients the jolt can be quite big.

The important thing is that the shock isn't causing any physical damage - it is just trying to correct a heart rhythm abnormality.

We try and program ICDs and fine tune medication to reduce the chance of anyone ever needing a shock, but of course this cannot be guaranteed, otherwise we wouldn't need ICDs.

An ICD deliver a shock for the following reasons:

- Dangerous fast heart rhythms from the ventricle, called ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation. We try and prevent these with medication, ablation and anti-tachycardia pacing.

- Less dangerous fast heart rhythms from the atrium, called atrial fibrillation and supra ventricular tachycardia. The ICD has computerised algorithms to distinguish these from the more dangerous rhythms. but when the atrial arrhythmias are very fast and sustained they can be dangerous and so the ICD will deliver a shock.

- ICD malfunction. This did occur occasionally up until about 5 years ago, but we haven't seen this recently because of improved technology and detection. We still sometimes have to replace leads and ICDs because we detect that a problem may arise in the future.

We hope and expect that our patients with ICDs will be able to live a similar lifestyle to before they had the ICD implanted. Sometimes when our patients do something that they were not accustomed to doing before, such as racing grandchildren up a hill, it can cause rhythm problems and ICD shocks.

Please see the patient information handbook section for what to do if you have a shock.

Dr Ian Beeton
Consultant Cardiologist
Ashford and St Peter's Hospital NHS Foundation Trust