Cardiac Arrhythmia Diagnosis: Standard or Ambulatory ECG?

Posted by williamjack on December 10th, 2019

Cardiac arrhythmia is counted among the most common heart disorders and is described as an abnormal heart rate or rhythm. In a healthy adult, the heartbeats consistently at a rate of 60 to 100 a minute; however, in a person with cardiac arrhythmia, the heart beats too fast or too slow or irregularly. 

When a cardiac arrhythmia occurs infrequently and unpredictably, it often produces abrupt symptoms which usually are no longer present by the time medical help arrives. This makes its diagnosis extremely difficult for medical professionals. A key part of the diagnostic process is ECG monitoring, which aims to capture the electrical activity of the heart and help clinicians to analyze it to find any irregularities.

Standard ECG monitoring

Standard ECG monitoring helps medical doctors to record your heart’s electrical activity for not more than 12 seconds. It enables them to know a lot about your heart. For example, it can reveal whether you have proper blood circulation or had a heart attack or whether you have any heart diseases. However, when it comes to diagnosing cardiac arrhythmias, it often fails to provide accurate and reliable information about your heart. This is because arrhythmias often occur infrequently and do not last for prolonged periods. As a result, standard ECG or several ECGs carried out at different times are likely to miss intermittent arrhythmias. 

Ambulatory ECG

Since cardiac arrhythmias produce symptoms for a brief period, lasting only for a few seconds, medical professionals require a better ECG monitoring system such as ambulatory ECG that records the electrical activity of the heart for an extended period. This enables them to record your heart rhythm as you carry out your normal activities such as sleeping, exercising, and others. This, in turn, increases the chances of capturing intermittent cardiac arrhythmias. Today, ambulatory ECG systems have outperformed standard ECG when it comes to diagnosing arrhythmias. 

Final Note

If you are confused about whether you should use standard ECG or ambulatory to capture irregular heartbeats of patients with undiagnosed cardiac arrhythmias, ambulatory heart monitoring is the path to go down. 

Today, a wide range of ambulatory ECG devices are available on the market to help diagnose and rule out the significant causes of arrhythmias. For medical professionals with a restricted budget, portable PC Based Ambulatory and Holter Monitoring ECG System is the most cost-effective, compact, comprehensive, and feature-rich option.

Author’s bio: The author is a blogger and this article is about Cardiac Arrhythmia Diagnosis: Standard or Ambulatory ECG.