What is Atrial Fibrillation ?

As a medical transcription trainees, you all must know about an important medical term, you would often encounter in files is atrial fibrillation. This is an important medical term related to cardiovascular system i.e. heart and blood vessels.  Then, what is atrial fibrillation?  We will see the meaning and definition of atrial fibrillation below.

We all know that heart is felt in our body by its beat sounds defined as lub dub sounds while doctors hear through a stethoscope. There are normal and abnormal heart beats can be understood by the professionals and so they can lead the exam with an Electrocardiograph scan to understand more about beats and electrical stimulated condition inside the heart.




So, an ECG or electrocardiograph scan report will tell more about the kind of heart beats and their characteristic features and consequences inside the heart currently and in the near future. Atrial fibrillation is nothing, but an irregular and also often a rapid heart rate related condition, which will lead to poor blood flow to the heart. Atrial fibrillation happens because of the disorganized electric signals inside the heart.



Atrial fibrillation is termed in short in medical field as AFib or AF. Atrial fibrillation may be felt as a fluttering sensation in the chest or sometimes we don't see any symptoms too. 

What happens while AFib?
Generally, atria are 2 chambers above the heart that should beat normally to pass the blood to the lower 2 chambers of ventricles, but in AFib or atrial fibrillation, beat happens irregularly, and so blood flow to the downward ventricles from the upper atria happen abnormally.



What is the seriousness of AFib?

If incidentally, a patient with any clots in the blood stream, the blood may enter abnormally inside the brain to make a STROKE...!, but this risk is studied in only 15 to 20 percentage of people only.  Atrial fibrillation is treated by giving blood thinners and so any clot blockage and more blood flow to the brain is controlled.

In the next post, we will see about another important cardiovascular term and its meaning. Ok. To move to the home page from here please CLICK HERE.

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