Question - Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome

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What exactly is this illness

Asked 6 years ago NikkiLouise94 50

I went to the hospital yesterday for my review of ecg, heart scan and 24 hour monitor results as in March I was admitted to a&e for being dehydrated in pregnancy. Im currently 24 weeks pregnant with my first and have now been diagnosed with this illness, ive read up on it but its just not making sense. The doctor said I was born with it but theyve only just discovered it, its never effected me or given me any symptoms at all but he wants to operate shortly after baby is born to remove the extra section.

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hi, your doctor is right saying that you were born with it. WPW is the result of things not quite going right when a foetus is developing. The heart separates in to 4 chambers and all it is... there's a tiny fibrous connection left between your aorta (top chambers) and ventricles (bottom chambers) that allows the electrical current pass through. In a normal heart, the electrical signal can only pass down through the AV node which acts as a regulator. In symptomatic WPW, the electrical signal can short circuit... allowing the heart to beat at much faster rates than it should. Occasionally this can result in syncope (fainting) as the heart is beating too fast to actually fill up with blood properly before the next beat occurs meaning that the brain doesn't get enough oxygen. Some people don't have any symptoms... others have many and it can become very problematic. Mine was causing me to pass out regularly and so I've had an ablation to fix it. Most people don't start having symptoms until late teens to early adulthood but babies are often diagnosed at birth. I hope that helps you understand a little better.. any more questions, just ask

Answered 6 years ago D 60
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Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome (WPW) is a congenital defect, meaning that it is a condition that you were born with. Your heart pumps blood by expanding and contracting its 4 chambers in a particular sequence. It is essentially a muscle that beats because of electrical impulses that travel through pathways (I'll refer to pathways as "wiring", just to make things a little easier to understand). WPW is also referred to as a pre-excitation of the heart, because those with it typically have a faster heart rate from typical people.

In short... With WPW, you were born with "extra wiring" in your heart that are also able to conduct these electrical impulses. It developed when you were a fetus forming in your mother's womb.

Because you have this extra wiring, sometimes the impulses shoot through the correct path and sometimes the they shoot through the extra pathway. Everytime it travels through the extra wiring, it screws up the heart's proper sequence when beating. The result is an arrhythmia (abnormal beat)... and you may feel a palpitation (flutter-type sensation in your chest), something that feels like a skipped beat or fainting. The risk with WPW patients is that an episode could occur where the electrical impulses loop around the heart's chambers with the extra pathway, causing your heart to rev up faster and faster to the point that it causes cardiac arrest. For those extreme cases of WPW, it is not uncommon for it to be as high as 240bpm to 320bpm.

I cannot emphasize enough that each case of WPW is different. Some people may have WPW and lead perfectly normal lives without ever knowing they had it; they are asymptomatic. Those with WPW who DO experience symptoms — like palpitations or fainting — have different degrees of severity. There are some who had symptoms early in life and have always known they've had it. Others, like you and I, found out much later in life; I was around 26 years old when my doctor did an ECG and discovered it. Most of my life, I had been asymptomatic and never even heard of this condition. It was only because I had a stressful period at work and was concerned about chest cramping that I learned I had it.

WPW is best treated by an electrophysiologist (or "EP doc" as I like to call him), who is a cardiologist with additional medical training specializing in heart arrhythmias. It is highly recommended that you have an appointment with an EP doc over a GP, because WPW is considered to be a rare condition and most GPs don't have a good grasp of the condition or experience with it. An EP doc or cardiologist will likely try to outfit you with a 24-hour Holter monitor (which records your heartbeat continuously for a day) or an Event monitor (which you wear and press a button whenever you experience a symptom). These monitors help them to determine the frequency of your symptoms and may be able to find out how severe your WPW is.

There are two common forms of treatment for WPW: medication and ablation. The medication typically prescribed is a beta blocker like propranolol, which works by chemically slowing down the heart rate and oftentimes stabilizing it. Cardiac ablation is where the doctor feeds a thin catheter (usually via an artery in your groin) to your heart with the help of a fluoroscope (like a real-time x-ray) or 3D heart mapping software and "zaps" the muscle tissue with the extra pathway using an RF tip (extreme heat) or cryoablation tip (extreme cold). This effectively kills the tissue and prevents it from conducting electrical impulses.

Ablation is considered a non-invasive, outpatient procedure and not "surgery" in terms of what most of us think of as surgery. Pain is minimal, typically. Usually the patient is conscious during the procedure or has been given a light sedation. I have been on propranolol and had 2 ablation attempts, RF and Cryo. The 1st attempt was aborted because the EP doctor though my extra pathway was too close to my AV Node (which regulates the impulses); he didn't want to accidentally damage the AV Node in the process. Several years later, with a new EP doc, we tried again using a cryo tip and that was successful. I have been WPW-free for the last 15 years.

I hope this explanation helps. If you didn't know you had WPW until now, I don't think you have anything to worry about. And the ablation procedure is not very scary. Good luck!

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