Get your AFib better with exercise

hi guys my name is Sanjay Gupta I'm a consultant cardiologist in York and today I wanted to do a video on the on exercise in afib exercise in afib in particular this video is about the benefits of exercise in patients with atrial fibrillation so we know that patients with atrial fibrillation often have comorbidities such as diabetes high blood pressure obesity etc and we also know very well that exercise is beneficial in terms of reducing some of these comorbidities or the burden of these comorbidities so if you have high blood pressure we know exercise is very good to reduce blood pressure if you are overweight we know exercise is good for that and but what we don't know is whether exercise is good for afib or not and often people worry about exercising because they worry about bringing on episodes of 8bit and there is also considerable evidence that people who do a lot of exercise high level endurance training you know ultra marathons very intense cycling etc in those people there's a much higher risk of atrial fibrillation so there is considerable anxiety and confusion amongst patients who have afib as to whether they should be exercising or not because you know they don't want to make their active worse secondly they always worry about whether the whether exercising is safe when you have afib and finally there's a lot of confusion as to exactly what kind of exercise to do to help the afib so I thought I'd try and answer those questions in this video ok last year there was a very interesting study published in the circulation journal by a group of researchers from Norway headed by a chap called Malmo ok and I'm going to put these link to the study on my Facebook page so if you are interested please do pop by I also put a link on on on YouTube ok so this was a very string study because they took 51 patients who had afib now the afib was either paroxysmal I came and went or persistent in that it was there for more than seven consecutive days and either required cardioversion to get them out of it and all would go out of it by itself after seven days so persistent or paroxysmal afib okay and these guys had been referred for an ablation for the atrial fibrillation because they were struggling with symptoms so there was having bad symptoms from their afib they were not really tolerating it very well they've been referred for an ablation and this group got in there and said now we'll put you through this study and what they did was they wanted to assess the effects of exercise on these patients with afib and so what they did was they implanted a loop recorder a little device under the chest in these patients and the advantage of that is that it allows you to measure the burden of atrial fibrillation very accurately because sometimes afib can be silent how do you know how long it's going on for so if you have a device which is measuring how much afib there is then you get a much more accurate estimation of exactly how much afib is and whether your study you know using exercise does benefit the amount of afib so that's why they put this in and then what they did was they divided this group of 51 patients into two groups okay one group was randomly assigned to an exercise program one group was randomly assigned just to do what they normally do the control group all right and they collected the data so the 26 patients were assigned to a 12-week aerobic interval training program and 25 patients were assigned to a control group where they were just allowed to do whatever they wanted to including the kind of exercises that they would normally do all right now these guys were not hugely overweight their average hydro six-feet and the weight was 93 kilos and their BMI was around about 28 so they're not obese patients by any means they're sort of average patients anyway what did they find at the end of the study after 12 weeks of aerobic interval training what they found was that the mean time in afib increased from 10% to 14% in the control group ie the group that was not put through the exercise program the group that was just allowed to do their own thing but in the group that went through the exercise program the time in afib reduced from eight point one percent to 4.8% so significant reduction in the amount of afib patients were getting as measured by the loop recorder but then you have to say well yes that's in the loop recorder but does that mean that the patient felt better and the exercise group reported a significant improvement not only in their quality of life but also they said that their a-fib episodes had become less frequent and when they did happen they were less severe than before so that's really interesting so not only objectively do you get less afib but subjectively the sensation of afib is a not as bad and the episodes of afib don't occur as frequently the patient's weights decreased by about two kilos in the group who had gone through the 12 week program compared to the control group and their cholesterol levels also fell the group that was exercised in them the cholesterol levels felt and very interestingly they also measured the atrial function the function of the atria by measured by using MRI scan and they found that actually in this group the group of patients who underwent through the exercise underwent the exercise regime in those in that group of patients the atrial function also improves there very very interesting and in always seemed the exercise programs seemed to benefit the patients with atrial fibrillation and remember these were symptomatic pretty symptomatic patients who had actually been initially referred for an ablation so that's these are powerful data it can so this is a very important study because it shows how beneficial exercise can be in patients who have afib and that exercise is not just for patients who are very obese but actually average patients with a BMI of 28 even in those patients the exercise not only reduced the amount of afib they were getting it made them feel better they lost weight their cholesterol levels came down and their atrial function improved okay so the next question is well how do you go about trying it for yourself what did this exercise regime can sister so if you wanted to try it out for yourself to see whether exercise benefits your afib what regime should you follow and I'll read out what these researchers used in the hope that you'll be able to replicate that okay so basically what they said was that you had to walk or run on a treadmill three times a week for 12 weeks all right and each session should start with a 10-minute warm-up at 60 to 70% of your maximum heart rate which is obtained by exercise testing so maximum heart rate is 220 minus H so you want to get in your 10-minute warm-up you want to get up to 60 or 70% of your maximum heart rate then you need to do four-minute intervals where you're getting your heart rate up to 85 to 95 percent of predicted maximum okay four-minute intervals of 85 to 95 percent check your predicted heart rate with three minutes of active recovery at 60 to 70 percent of the heart rate between the intervals so 10 minutes get your heart rate up to 60 to 70 percent and then go to four for a minute intervals where you're getting your heart rate up to 85 to 95 percent interspersed with three minute recovery periods where the heart rate comes down to 60 to 70 percent so you're getting the heart rate up to 85 to 95 percent during exercise bringing it down to 60 to 70 percent and then going back and and this is a regime that seemed to work so well for these patients so if you want to try it out for yourself I would thoroughly encourage it it's also worth saying that these patients were did the same thing regardless of whether they were out of afib during the exercise or whether they were in afib during the exercise so just because you're an afib doesn't necessarily mean that you can't exercise or that the exercise is dangerous to you okay so I hope this was useful if you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing please consider sharing it it means a lot to me if you share because it increases my subscriber base and when I come home after a busy day there's nothing better than to know that people are subscribing and commenting and it just fills me with lots of enthusiasm and makes me really happy so thank you so much as I always say please consider sharing it with any of your friends who might find it interesting if they find it interesting great otherwise I'll bore them to sleep and we know sleep is really good for afib alright say all the best take care bye

Channel: York Cardiology

Views: 184,482

Keywords: Afib, AF, atrial fibrillation, heal, exercise, natural, cure, beat AFib, palpitations, ablation, lifestyle, anxiety, stop fib, anaerobic exercise, symptoms, Heart racing, Heart flutter causes, Heart palpitations at night, Racing heart, Fluttering heart, Heart skipping beats, Irregular heartbeat symptoms, Anxiety palpitations, Constant heart palpitations, Heart flutter symptoms, Heart palpitations at rest

Id: X-hH3NmBsLo

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 12 2017