That’s one way to make your heart jump — or slow it down, in one man’s case.
Walking home one night, a 29-year-old man from Queens started experiencing heart palpitations at 140 beats per minute (bpm), far higher than the average resting heart rate of 60 to 100 bpm.
But when he was admitted to the hospital, the solution came as a bit of a surprise in an area farther south of his heart.
Rarely dangerous or life-threatening, heart palpitations can be brought on by several causes, like a lack of sleep, caffeine, alcohol or stress.
The rapid fluttering, flip-flopping or pounding sensations in the chest often go away on their own, or could be a sign of arrhythmia, abnormal heartbeats when electrical signals that tell the organ how to beat aren’t working properly.
Before using standard procedures to restore regularity, the attending doctor needed to check for gastrointestinal bleeding by performing a routine digital rectal exam, as written in a report of the case.
A finger up the butt was all it took to slow down the patient’s heartbeat to 80 bpm and make the irregular heartbeat disappear, even months later at a follow-up.
Having no history of heart problems or signs of a heart attack, the man had undergone an electrocardiogram earlier that detected signs of atrial fibrillation (AFib), a common type of arrhythmia.
AFib means the heart’s upper and lower chambers are out of sync, resulting in less blood filling the lower chambers and reaching the lungs and the rest of the body.
While the cause of the man’s irregular heartbeat was unknown, typically medications or a procedure that uses synchronized, low-energy electrical shocks are the first lines of treatment.
The patient was also prescribed an anticoagulant to prevent the formation of blood clots.
While the usual treatments slow and regulate heart rhythm within hours, the rectal exam provided the same solution in a matter of minutes.
The theory was that the exam affected the man’s nervous system by stimulating the vagus nerve, the longest cranial nerve in the body, which connects the brain to major organs like the lungs, gut, and heart.
During the exam, the man was also instructed to use a technique called the “Valsalva maneuver,” a breathing exercise that increases activity in the vagus nerve.
Vagus nerve stimulation is thought to increase activity in the parasympathetic nervous system, the counter to the body’s “fight or flight” mode, and slow electrical conduction in the heart.
Although the exact cause is unknown, AFib is often associated with overactivity of the parasympathetic nervous system.
However, the heart condition can sometimes be linked to another serious condition, congestive heart failure, meaning the heart doesn’t pump blood efficiently.
In the case of the man from Queens, though, the doctor who treated him believes the vagus nerve stimulation slowed down his heartbeats.
While the rectal procedure could be another method of treating heart arrhythmias, more research is needed before it replaces traditional methods like medications or medical procedures.
