Why does eating food or drinking alcohol trigger Atrial Fibrillation AF?An illustrated explanation

[Music] so in this video I'm going to try and explain what the relationship between the heart and the gut is and why it is that eating certain foods can trigger atrial fibrillation so if we start off here with the heart and we can see the heart is if you like hidden behind the breastbone which I've just taken away in the human body like this I'm now going to bring on the digestive tract and this sits behind the heart so if I swing this round you can see that the esophagus which is essentially this structure here lace just behind the heart so this is the heart and the esophagus just lies behind the esophagus then feeds into the stomach what I'm gonna do is show this to you in a different view where the esophagus now comes into the stomach now now that we understand the anatomy if we take off the skeleton for clarity and we just focus on the heart we can see that the heart here sits on top of the diaphragm and this is the heart there's a diaphragm layer which is not shown and the esophagus here here feeds into the stomach now what I'm gonna do is just twist this diagram a bit so we can see that clearly and start to take out elements of the gut including the liver here and we now focus entirely on the stomach and the heart and you can see how the stomach lies to the left hand side of the of your abdomen so you're left in this particular image because we're looking face front it's on the right of the picture and the relationship here can be explained by these guys so if I take on three layers of nervous tissue the yellow fibers that you see which are highly complex structures are nervous tissues and these nerves obviously originate from the brain and the spinal cord and there are long nerves and large nerves that come from the brain I'm just going to point them out here here on both sides and in particular the vagus nerve is a are two large nerves coming from the left and the right side which go throughout the cardiac or the thoracic cavity into the abdominal cavity like this and the key thing to see here is that if I flick to the back wall here for clarity and I start to take away some elements again for clarity what we can see is that the heart and the esophagus are linked through a whole series of interconnected neurons now I want to now look into you here and necessarily this is very intricate can you see that the heart here has a posterior wall and this posterior wall here this structure is called the left atrium this is the left upper parma vein the right upper cut my vein the floor of the left atrium the right upper parma beam and the right lower Parveen so this whole chamber is called the left atrium this chamber down here is the left ventricle the right ventricle is behind that now in the left atrium you can see a very dense innovation of nervous cells and I'm just going to point that out here which innervates the heart in this way and one theory about atrial fibrillation is that when this veins when this nervous tissue fires rapidly with lots of activity coming from the nerves it causes like topic beats from within the parveen's in this example in the left upper part of aim to fire very rapidly and this can then trigger atrial fibrillation in the left atrium which is the primary chamber of interest now why this having a large meal impact this if I now take you back and let's follow the nerves down you can see that the gut and the stomach for example here is also richly innovated here with the nervous tissue supplying the stomach here and when the stomach stretches for example with a large meal and the stomach starts to churn there can be activity that is sensed by these nerves the activity that is sensed by this sensory nerves sends a signal up to the brain to initiate the digestion process and to create a very complex series of reactions that send nervous traffic down again directly from the brain to the heart to say that we are starting to digest food and therefore we need to get our stomach juices flowing get the stomach contraction going and get all the small bowel or intestine going in a way that promotes peristaltic motion so peristaltic motion is when for example an area of the stomach or intestine contracts and then a few seconds later this area contracts this area expands this area contracts so that the bolus of food are pushed down in one direction which is this direction and not the reverse and this is a very highly coordinated series of sequential contractions that are so importantly and intricately controlled by the nerves surrounding the gut so the gut is also known to be as a second brain because there's so many collection there's so much nerves that the density of nerves is is incredibly high now the sensory nerve supply also sends the signal back up and in doing so what it can do is that it can tickle the nerve fibers in the heart on the way up so I'm just going to try and pick on an earth here it's a whole leash of nerves and you can imagine how with a large meal or with the stickler trigger that you might have for example fizzy water alcohol or particularly spicy meal you trigger the nerve fibers in a certain way that send perhaps a signal up and the signal comes back and on the way up they can come back and lead to activity increased activity within the cardiac nervous system or so-called ganglion ated plaques i within the heart and these areas of rich innovation within the heart which are called ganglion it's a plaques i can trigger atrial fibrillation as i described in the palmer veins and that is why there is a strong connection between the gut and the heart which we've not really fully understood until recently and so if your atrial fibrillation or indeed any other arrhythmia is triggered by food then this is one explanation as to why this might be the case [Music] you

Channel: Dr Boon Lim

Views: 199,083

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Id: XtW7_Vbp0zg

Length: 7min 50sec (470 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020