Advanced Treatments to Stop A-Fib
Personalized care from the region’s experts
That flutter in your chest could be atrial fibrillation (a-fib). A-fib is a serious condition that can result in an irregular heartbeat, and if left untreated, could lead to blood clots and stroke.
The cardiologists and surgeons at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute offer the full range of treatment options, from medication to advanced ablations to surgery.
If you have been diagnosed with a-fib, call 816-751-8415 to schedule a consultation.
Treatment Options
Saint Luke’s personalized a-fib treatment options include:
- Medication: Help slow the heartbeat and keep it beating more regularly.
- Electrical cardioversion: Special pads are placed on the chest and used to send one or more brief electrical shocks to help reset the heartbeat to a normal rhythm.
- Ablation: Long, thin tubes called catheters are threaded through a blood vessel to the heart. The catheters send energy to the areas within the heart that are causing the abnormal signals, destroying the problem tissue. This procedure improves the chances that your heart will stay in normal rhythm without medicine. Saint Luke’s participated in four clinical trials of pulsed field ablation and performed the first procedure in our region.
- Surgery: Our providers may use advanced methods, like the hybrid convergent procedure, to disrupt the abnormal signals and stop a-fib from occurring.
Recent Innovations in A-fib Treatment
Saint Luke’s is often the region’s only hospital to offer advanced investigational treatments. For example, our patients can benefit from a left atrial appendage occlusion procedure, such as implanting a WATCHMAN® device, which is an alternative to blood thinners. Saint Luke’s is currently participating in clinical trials to determine whether WATCHMAN should be a first line stroke prevention strategy for a-fib.
We also were the first hospital in the region to offer pulsed field ablation, a novel type of ablation that selectively targets just the tissues causing a-fib. The procedure uses electrical fields to create tiny holes in the membranes of heart muscle cells. This causes the targeted cells that contribute to irregular heart rhythms to die without altering the overall structure of the tissue or affecting other cell types.
If you have been diagnosed with a-fib, call 816-751-8415 to schedule a consultation.