What are heart blocks?

Heart blocks can cause us to faint or lose consciousness. Attention to these and other symptoms will help us to remedy them and prevent them from worsening.

Heart blocks indicate that there is a problem in the transmission of electrical impulses that cause the heart to contract and beat faster or slower. When this fails, it is very likely that we will faint or lose consciousness.

Let’s imagine that we are exercising, for example we are running. If we suffer from one of these heart blocks, our heart instead of pumping faster as it would naturally, may do the opposite.

When we exercise, we need the heart to pump more blood and much faster. If the heart rate slows, chances are that the necessary blood will not reach our body and we will pass out.

The different degrees of heart blocks

Sometimes we suffer from heart blocks, but we are hardly aware of it or go unnoticed. This happens because, perhaps, we are in the first degree of this type of blockage.

We are going to see that there are three different degrees of heart block. We will discover what characteristics each of them has and how it affects us to find ourselves in one degree or another at the heart.

First grade

The first degree of heart block is characterized by hardly any symptoms. There is no fainting and no loss of consciousness. But maybe there is some feeling that our tension is lowering. Maybe we get very white or slightly dizzy.

The speed of transmission of the electrical impulses that cause the heart to contract and pump is slightly reduced. This can be a red flag that we should pay attention to in case the problem worsens. However, most of the time it can go unnoticed.

Second grade

In the second degree of heart blocks the situation worsens a little more. The heart can skip a beat, we can even perceive that it beats irregularly or slower than it should.

This is because some of the electrical impulses are failing.

When some electrical impulses fail, they sometimes do not reach the heart. If this happens, it is normal for your heart to skip or suddenly have an irregular rhythm.

In some cases, the symptoms that we can perceive are slight. For example, we get dizzy, perhaps a little more than if we were in a first degree of heart blocks. However, many times, fainting starts to occur.

Third degree

The third degree of heart block is the most serious and requires immediate medical attention, since the person’s life could be in serious danger.

In this degree, most impulses fail and the heart beats at a very slow rate, so much so that it seems to stop.

You must pay attention to possible fainting that you may suffer, very intense dizziness and loss of consciousness.

However, you must also attend to that possible shortness of breath that you can associate with a lack of resistance when, in reality, it is heart block that you are suffering.

Complications of heart blocks

If a heart block becomes overly complicated, a person may require surgery to implant a pacemaker to monitor the heartbeat. However, many times this is not necessary and only a few exams and medical control are required.

Most heart blocks are the result of:

  • Suffering from heart disease.
  • Having experienced a heart attack that has damaged the transmission of electrical impulses.
  • Having an autoimmune disease.

Sometimes you are born with a predisposition to heart block. In others, they are triggered by other types of causes.

Considering the lack of air that we suffer as a lack of resistance or normalizing those drops in tension that we suffer can lead us to avoid a problem of this type.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top