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Can betablickers for svt make ectopics worse

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deborah36618
deborah36618

Having had multiple svt attacks over 5 hrs i was given 1.25mg bisoprolol week ago. Apart from possibly having to stop them due to very tight chest (see gp tomorrow) my ectopics have become much more frequent and powerful.

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  • tinaweena
    tinaweena deborah36618

    Posted

    Yes they can.I was put on them years ago and I used to wake up in the night with very forceful eptopics. In the daytime I also felt them more as the beata blockers slow your heart and makes the eptopics feel more forceful and so you feel them more in my experience.
  • chadcf
    chadcf deborah36618

    Posted

    I have not personally found this to be true for me but I have heard that it is a plausible idea. PVCs are generally triggered by areas of the ventricles which serve as a backup to the normal heartbeat, they are designed to fire off at a slower rate (around 30 bpm) if the ventricles don't get an impulse from the atria. This is sort of a backup to keep you alive should something happen to block the signal coming down (like an A/V block or sinus node damage). These cells will fire off a signal to beat unless they get overridden by the proper signal coming through which usually happens much more often than the ventricle backup cells would normally beat. 

    Since beta blockers slow your heart rate, it does increase the time between heartbeats. This creates more time for one of these backup clusters in the ventricle to fire, and if like many of us your ventricular backup cells are a bit twitchy and too easily activated, it is plausible the slower heart rate could make it happen more often. 

    For me personally, on 100mg metoprolol for years, I haven't found it to make a bit of difference. But I have heard from others who felt that it definitely did make them worse and stopping them helped. 

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