Articles

Bay Med Uses Latest Technology to Correct Irregular Heartbeats

Article Taken From The Bay City Times, Sunday, July 24, 2005

     Larry Schulz endured a lifetime of heartache.
     After suffering four heart attacks, three strokes and dying three times on an operating room table, the 54-year-old Bay City man figured he'd have to live out the rest of his days cursed with a bad heart.
     But that was before he met Nilofar Islam, M.D.
     "There were two things on my side: the good Lord and Dr. Islam. I feel like it was divine intervention that put her in my life so she could fix my heart."
     "I call her my angel," Schulz explained.
     Islam joined the staff of bay Regional Medical Center in early 2005 and is already making a huge impact on the lives of Bay Area heart patients like Schulz. Islam is an electrophysiologist - a cardiologist who specializes in the electronic problems of the heart. It's Islam's job to step in when a person's normal heart rhythms are disrupted resulting in either slow heart rates or fast heart rates.
     Larry Schulz first met Islam in April after battling a series of heart problems that began plaguing him in February 2002.
     The father of three boys suffered from atrial fibrillation, a disorder found in about 2.2 million Americans. In it the heart's two small upper chambers (the atria) quiver instead of beating effectively. Blood isn't pumped completely out of them, so it may pool and clot. If a piece of a blood clot in the atria leaves the heart and becomes lodged in an artery in the brain, a stroke results.
     About 15 percent of strokes occur in people with atrial fibrillation.
     Indeed, Schulz had three strokes and four heart attacks over the last three years. His racing heart caused him to frequently pass out - 30 times in the first three months of this year alone. While a normal heart beats about 70 times per minutes, Schulz's heart would beat more than 300 times per minute.
     "It's been a hell of a ride, let me tell you," Schulz recalls.
     In April, though, Islam "rewired" the electronic impulses in Schulz's heart using a method called ablation, thereby allowing his heart to return to a normal beat.
     "I had surgery on a Friday morning, I was out of Bay Med by 6 o'clock Saturday night and I was back to work on Monday. It was a miracle," said Schulz, a longtime employee at the City of Bay City Electric Department.
     In the past several years, the understanding of and ability to treat electrical problems in the heart have increased dramatically. Bay Regional Medical Center's Electrophysiology (EP) Lab offers a full range of possible services for patients affected by electrical disturbances of the heart.
     Because Electrophysiology is the fastest growing discipline in the cardiovascular field, Bay Regional is just finishing construction on a new EP lab for Islam and the EP staff.
     Potential EP patients would be people who suffer abnormal heart-beats or who have suffered previous heart failure.
     Bay Regional Medical Center is the only hospital north of Ann Arbor that performs cryoablations - freezing parts of the heart that contain abnormally conducting electricity with liquid nitrous oxide using a catheter inserted through a vein and into the heart.
     The advantage over the more often used radioablation (which uses heat) is that a surgeon can temporarily freeze the bad circuit to see if the problem has been resolved.
     "Once we know where the exact location of the abnormal pathway is, with cryo (ultra cold), we are able to map to minus 30 degrees Celsius, creating a potentially reversible lesion. This assures the location is safe and effective before proceeding to making the lesion permanent by freezing at minus 70 degrees Celsius," Islam explained.
State-of-the-art technology like cryoablation and a sophisticated way to map the electronics of the heart place Bay Regional's EP lab ahead of the rest, Islam said.
     "You're able to make a lot of people feel better...which is terrific," she said.

What Is Electrophysiology?

     In simple terms, the heart is a pump made up of muscle tissue. Like all pumps, the heart requires a source of energy in order to function. The heart's pumping energy comes from an internal electrical conduction system.
     The subspecialty within cardiology that deals with the heart's electrical system is called Electrophysiology (EP). EP is the study of the "wiring" of the heart muscle.
     Bay Regional Medical Center's EP Lab offers the full range of possible services for patients affected by electrical disturbances of the heart.
     The EP Lab may perform a number of tests to identify the risk of sudden cardiac death or other arrhythmias including: echocardiogram, holter monitor, event recorder and Electrophysiology study. Ablation therapy, which can be either radio frequency or cryoablation (ultra cold), is effective in treating a broad range of fast heart rates.
     The EP Lab also implants pacemakers, internal cardiac defibrillators (ICDs), and treats heart failure with cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT), using biventricular pacemakers.

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