Air Travel May Increase The Risk Of Cardiac Arrhythmia And Heartbeat Irregularities

Air Travel May Increase The Risk Of Cardiac Arrhythmia And Heartbeat Irregularities.
Air touring could amass the risk for experiencing heartbeat irregularities amongst older individuals with a history of heart disease, a new study suggests. The decree stems from an assessment of a small group of people - some of whom had a history of heart condition - who were observed in an environment that simulated flight conditions.

She said"People never think about the fact that getting on an airplane is basically take pleasure in going from sea level to climbing a mountain of 8000 feet," said go into author Eileen McNeely, an instructor in the department of environmental health at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. "But that can be very stressful on the heart. Particularly for those who are older and have underlying cardiac disease".

McNeely and her rig are slated to allowance their findings Thursday at the American Heart Association's Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention annual colloquy in San Francisco. The authors illustrious that the number one cause for in-flight medical emergencies is fainting, and that feeling faint and/or dizzy has earlier been associated with high altitude exposure and heartbeat irregularity, even among elite athletes and otherwise nutritious individuals.

To assess how routine commercial air travel might affect cardiac health, McNeely and her colleagues gathered a guild of 40 men and women and placed them in a hypobaric chamber that simulated the atmospheric situation that a passenger would typically experience while flying at an altitude of 7000 feet. The run-of-the-mill age of the participants was 64, and one-third had been previously diagnosed with heart disease.

Over the way of two days, all of the participants were exposed to two five-hour sessions in the hypobaric chamber: one reflecting simulated plane conditions and the other reflecting the atmospheric conditions experienced while at sea level. Throughout the experiment, the scrutinization team monitored both respiratory and heart rhythms - in the latter precedent to specifically see whether flight conditions would prompt extra heartbeats to occur in either chamber of the heart.