When fainting is a sign that you’ve got a dicky heartbeat
Danielle Urquhart (pictured) fainted regularly, but for ten years it was put down to an innocuous cause, such as a lack of food or an infection. In fact she had a faulty heartbeat
Danielle Urquhart fainted regularly, but for ten years it was put down to an innocuous cause, such as a lack of food or an infection.
In fact she had a faulty heartbeat.
Like two million Britons, Danielle, 26, had a form of heart rhythm problem. These can cause the heart to beat sporadically too fast, too slow or in a combination of the two; undiagnosed faulty heart rhythms raise the risk of heart failure, stroke or cardiac arrest.
Heart rhythm problems are more common with age, but affect young people, too. Unfortunately, the symptoms, such as dizziness, light-headedness, breathlessness and fainting, can be dismissed — as in Danielle’s case.
She was 15 when she first fainted, during a school PE lesson.
‘I just passed out — I woke up after a few seconds feeling tired and sick. My parents said it was probably because I hadn’t eaten enough,’ says Danielle, a support worker at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. She lives in the city with husband Douglas, 27, a landscape gardener and their son Kian, two.
‘A year later, I’d been running, popped into a shop and fainted again, this time for a couple of minutes. Luckily, I wasn’t hurt.’
She fainted again at work at the hospital when she was 17. ‘When I woke up I was surrounded by lots of doctors who got me a drink of water and told me to eat lunch.
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‘Three days later it happened again. This time I was sent to AE where they took blood tests. I had a urinary infection and was sent home with antibiotics.’
Fainting isn’t always a worrying sign. As Clifford Garratt, a professor of cardiology at Manchester University, explains. ‘There will be individuals who are susceptible to losing consciousness in certain situations.
‘For instance, when you have blood taken or experience pain, you may have a lowering of blood pressure and you might faint.
‘Standing in a hot hall during school assembly is another situation, and grooms fainting at their weddings. They’ve probably had no breakfast, might be hungover, hot and nervous.’
But fainting in other circumstances, such as during exercise, is not normal, he says, and should be investigated. It can occur if the heart rate is too slow, reducing oxygen to the brain, or too fast, overstimulating the body.
Fainting is a temporary loss of consciousness of up to a couple of minutes (any longer suggests it’s a seizure or concussion). ‘Even in young people it’s not normal to have episodes of loss of consciousness,’ says Professor Garratt. ‘You shouldn’t ignore them.’
After her fainting episodes as a teenager, Danielle was fine for the next four years. But then, after returning from honeymoon when she was 21, the faints became more frequent. Sometimes she’d have three in a month then nothing for six months or more.
It wasn’t just fainting that affected her. As she recalls: ‘For years I felt tired and breathless. Some days I could barely get out of bed.’
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Not long after her honeymoon, Danielle collapsed at her mother-in-law’s house. ‘I was sitting down, felt unwell, got up to get a drink, my heart started beating really fast and I blacked out.’
Danielle drifted in and out of consciousness until an ambulance arrived ten minutes later. ‘Everyone thought it was the stress of the wedding.’ she says. ‘The doctors ran blood tests, I had a high temperature, so they were looking for an infection, but the tests came back fine.
‘They did an ECG which showed my heart was fast, 120, but no abnormalities showed up.’
Over the next 12 months she fainted three more times, then saw her GP. ‘He said I had an infection and that my body was taking time to get over it. My heart was racing, but he said your heart always beats faster when you’re battling a virus.’
She collapsed again the following day and was out for a few minutes. This time, tests at hospital showed her heart rate was 180 beats per minute — normal is between 60 and 100 — and she was diagnosed with supraventricular tachycardia, basically an abnormally fast heartbeat.
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Doctors thought beta-blockers might bring Danielle’s heart rate down but they led to horrible side-effects. ‘I had nightmares, my ankles would swell and I was more exhausted than ever,’ she recalls.
For 18 months she tried different types of medication, but fainted three more times and was put on a three-month waiting list to see a cardiologist.
Life had to be put on hold. ‘I couldn’t go out for a drink because I was scared I’d faint, and alcohol speeds your heart up,’ she says. ‘I was sensitive to anything with caffeine, I was frightened to go to the gym. I felt pretty down.’
She fainted again, hitting her head on a radiator and ending up in AE with concussion. Further tests revealed she had two abnormal electrical pathways in her heart, which were thought to be causing her rapid heartbeat.
She was given ablation, where the faulty nerve pathways are destroyed under a local anaesthetic using radio frequency waves. Ablation has a 95 per cent success rate, but twice, in 2013 and 2014, surgeons tried it on Danielle without success.
When she became pregnant, the fainting stopped, although her blood pressure was sky high. ‘I spent every second day in hospital until Kian was born, just to make sure he was OK,’ she recalls.
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Seven months after he was born, she fainted again. ‘The older Kian got the harder it got. I was unwell a lot of the time.’
A third ablation didn’t work and six weeks later she fainted again — this time her heart was too slow, just 40 beats a minute.
By a process of elimination it was found that Danielle had sick sinus syndrome, an umbrella term for heart rhythm problems where the fault is the heart’s natural pacemaker (the sinus node).
The sinus node is a group of cells in the upper right chamber of the heart; they control the heart’s rhythm by sending electrical signals that tell the heart to beat.
In sick sinus syndrome these signals are fired in an irregular pattern and the only solution was a pacemaker.
Danielle had an electronic pacemaker fitted in November 2015, which was removed after an infection. The second was fitted last year, just after her 25th birthday, and resolved all her symptoms.
‘I feel a million times better,’ Danielle says. ‘I don’t get dizzy spells or nausea any more. I’m not exhausted all the time. I feel like a different person.’
For more information visit bhf.org.uk