A new FDA-approved treatment for atrial fibrillation, a common heart condition impacting millions of Americans, is now being used on Chicago-area patients at Endeavor Health Swedish Hospital.
Susan Geil from Chicago became one of the first in Illinois to undergo the procedure on March 5.
“It sounded good that there were fewer risks. It was safer, but just as effective,” Geil said.
In December 2023, Geil first noticed her heart beating irregularly and very fast. She went to see Dr. Hany Demo, a cardiac electrophysiologist at Endeavor Health Swedish Hospital.
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“The normal heartbeat is 60 to 100 beats per minute, the upper and lower chamber going at the same speed. In atrial fibrillation, AF, the upper chambers go about 400 to 500 beats per minute. They go extremely fast,” Demo said.
AF is caused by unwanted tissue in four spots in the veins in the upper left chamber of the heart that bring the oxygenated blood from the lungs to the heart.
The new FDA-approved technology from Medtronic called the PulseSelect™ Pulsed Field Ablation (PFA) System destroys that unwanted tissue in a new way, using pulsed electric fields.
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“You ablate this tissue using electrical fields, without heating the tissue significantly,” Demo said. “We are among the first hospitals to use this technology.”
The new technique uses electric pulses, which Demo said is safer than previous techniques which were either hot or cold, cauterization & cryotherapy.
“Both ways are effective, but it's always been, it comes with the price that you have to worry about the adjacent structures, the food pipe, their esophagus, for example,” said Demo.
While the patient is sedated, Demo threads a catheter up from the groin into the heart. Instead of using x-ray technology to guide the catheter, Demo uses an intracardiac echocardiogram, which means there’s no radiation.
“Just the safer way to do it for the patient and also safer for the staff. Imagine that we're doing these cases every day. So the amount of radiation that the staff also get exposed to will be higher,” Demo said.
It’s the safety profile that appealed to Patricia Carbonara, another one of Demo’s patients to undergo the procedure on March 5.
“When Dr. Demo said there's a new way and started to show us and talk to us about it, I was like, yeah, let's do it,” Carbonara said.
It was in December 2023, Carbonara began suffering from fatigue, water retention and shortness of breath and was diagnosed with AF.
Ten days after the outpatient procedure, she’s back to doing the things she loves with her husband, Earl, and her two dogs.
“It's been great. I mean, I'm out walking my dogs again, and I'm working out again,” Carbonara said.
