Well, I'm afraid you'll have to be far more specific about your holter test in order for me to tell you anything at all. What were the specific notations regarding the test that rendered it abnormal?

You also need to relax. The holter test, like many diagnostic tools, will render an "abnormal" classification if any of the parameters in the database are violated for any reason. It doesn't necessarily mean something is wrong.

Again, we need to know a great deal of specifics here in order to provide you with an explanation. Also, please realize that the forum is open so when you provide results of medical tests, you are publishing them to an open website. If this bothers you for any reason, then you may want to use the private messaging system available on the forum. It's simply important to remind you that privacy issues where your medical records are concerned do not extend to any publication you extend to the forum.

Otherwise, once I have more details, I can help sort out the reason for the abnormal declaration.

Best regards and Good Health

Okay, negative test results literally mean negative. Please read my other postings concerning this issue. Diagnostic equipment is based upon algorithms of actual disease so if the test returns negative, it literally means no disease is present.

Many people come to believe that they may be the one in a million that something has been overlooked. This is not the case. The symptoms you are experiencing have no underlying basis in heart disease or similar condition, a fact strongly supported by your test results.

You're going to be just fine. My suggestion is to address the anxiety disorder that may be present and certainly capable of producing physical symptoms such as those experienced.

Best regards and Good Health

Okay, your posting exemplifies a very critical point that I'd like to share with you and the other members. Many people who are frightened and worried about the palpitations and other symptoms they are experiencing begin reading about various conditions or diseases and their associated symptoms. This can be a double-edged sword for obvious reasons.

Human physiology is extremely complex and you simply can head for the nearest website and read about symptoms that are subsequently determined to be "similar" or "like" your own. It is by far not that straight-forward and a background in medicine is almost always necessary to properly discriminate the various factors either being discussed in medical literature or on medical health websites that offer general information.

In answer to your question, you do not have atrial fibrillation. The type of palpitations you are experiencing do not have an origin from within the heart itself. You are using cause and effect thinking in order to rationalize that if the symptom is associated with the heart, then the cause is the heart as well. This is absolutely an innacurate approach to the circumstances and if medicine were that simplistic, it would not require such a lengthy education and residency in order to be deemed competent to practice.

It's also important to re-read your posting to realize that your anxiety over this matter and the subjective interpretations of what you believe may be happening during the episodes is causing you to establish your own rules about how the diagnostic equipment may operate or provide data. The holter monitor does not require some type of high voltage occurance to be able to detect the problem.

The trouble is that when patients create the rationale that their heart is in trouble, then until the symptoms abate they will continuously seek out an underlying physical cause and pursue it to sometimes great lengths because they feel compelled to believe that something has absolutely been overlooked.

Well, it has. But not in the context you might think. If diagnostic tests consistently reveal the absence of disease, then the patient must at some point come to terms with the fact that they are misinterpreting what is taking place and therefore must try to discover and better understand what is actually happening rather than what their gut instinct is telling them.

I'm glad that you want to be okay, because in fact you are okay. It is your misinterpretations and rationale that is causing you to believe otherwise. Your heart is fine and the tests prove it. As for reading somewhere that 54% of people are told they're fine when in fact they're not . . . . .well, please feel free to forward me the actual citation so that I can examine it. To suggest that this information is in any way accurate is saying that more than half of all people being told that they're fine are actually quite ill and none of the diagnostic tests were able to detect the problem. Those are odds that are not only questionable, they're unsupported in any manner whatsoever.

You need to pause and consider whether it is your interpretation of what is happening that may be in error. Only then will you begin to open up to the idea that something else is causing the symptoms and you can begin to move forward in determining ways to either diminish or resolve their occurance.

You're going to be just fine.

Best regards and Good Health

Many circumstances can cause brief changes in blood pressure and autonomic function in general. People with anxiety disorders commonly sense changes that they misinterpret as something very bad about to happen to them. Fear only causes the symptoms to become even more prominent and panic thresholds or fainting episodes are not uncommon.

It's important to realize that many folks can experience light-headedness or slight variations in stability when exiting an elevator or escalator and a lot of times it has to do with feedback from the vestibular network in the ears. Brief changes in blood pressure and other autonomic functions can create immediate concern in a person who doesn't understand what is taking place. It is most often construed as a sign of physical illness or disease of some type.

This suspicion often causes vigilence by the person to every subtle function by the body, ie heart rate, vision, breathing, strange sensations on the surface of the skin or internally and other oddities.

What results from this vigilence is health anxiety and the more the person senses strange and unfamiliar symptoms, the more obsessed they become with trying to determine what is going wrong. In fact, nothing is likely wrong at all and your attention to your physiological functions is probably the only aspect of what is making you think something is wrong.

Remember that the human body is extremely dynamic, meaning that changes take place every second in response to both internal needs and changes in the external environment. The fact that you had a single experience is simple testimony that you are misinterpreting it as something bad. It was simply the body responding to inappropriate feedback from the senses, ie the occulo-vestibular network etc, as a consequence of motion within a context where some of the senses are incapable of correct perception. In other words, an elevator does not have any windows or visual reference by which your body can make adjustments based upon visual reference while in motion. This is very often the cause of motion sickness.

So my suggestion here to is move away from focusing on that event as the starting point for something more serious. It is not the case here and your worries are unfounded. It might help to visit websites that can educate you further on the occulo-vestibular system and how the body uses feedback to create changes within the body, what causes motion sickness and the range of symptoms experienced by many people under the influence of sensory feedback or the lack of it in certain cases.  

You'll be just fine.

Best regards and Good Health