Patient/caregiver was educated on pathophysiology of ventricular fibrillation as follows:
- Heart has a natural pacemaker, SA node, which initiates the impulse for a heartbeat.
- The impulse initiated in the SA node, with the help of other conductive tissues, spreads along the rest of heart muscle, thus helping with the programmed opening and closing of heart valves, organized contraction of individual heart chambers, and preventing any disturbance to the normal blood flow.
- In a healthy heart with normally functioning SA node, the beats are evenly spaced out, at a rate of 60 – 100 beats/minute. This evenly spaced out pattern of heartbeats is called the normal heart rhythm or sinus rhythm.
- In ventricular fibrillation, additional impulses for the contraction of heart are initiated from multiple sites of damaged heart muscle in and around the ventricles or lower chambers of the heart. This abnormal rhythm can be significantly high and thereby, disturb and dominate the normal rhythm initiated in the SA node.
- Damage to the ventricular heart muscle could be due to various factors, such as, excessive cholesterol deposition, reduced blood flow to heart muscle, history of heart attack (myocardial infarction), and many more.
- Scar tissue formed during healing of the damaged cardiac tissue can inhibit normal conduction of impulse and result in abnormal routes of conduction of cardiac impulse, thus resulting in arrhythmia.
- In ventricular fibrillation, the impulses that originate in multiple sites of damaged heart tissue in the ventricles give rise to an irregular, abnormal, uncoordinated, rapid, and chaotic rhythm, at a rate as high as 400 – 500 beats per minute.
- Effective and organized contraction of heart chambers is important for normal blood flow and adequate pumping of blood by heart to vital organs. Irregular and chaotic rhythm of ventricular fibrillation results in dangerously ineffective and abnormal contractions of the heart chambers.
- Grossly ineffective and abnormal contractions of the lower chambers of heart, out of synchronization with the activity of upper chambers, result in compromised output of oxygenated blood volume from the heart and reduced flow to vital organs, thus affecting their function.
- This abnormal heart rhythm can be life-threatening, be treated as an emergency, and needs management with medications.
