The dangers of ignoring a racing heart
STANDING on stage, ready to begin his next number, rock musician Alessandro Miccoli, 28, felt his heart pounding. ‘Within seconds my chest had tightened up — I could hardly breathe and the arteries on either side of my neck were sticking out as thick as pencils,’ he says.
‘I could see my clothes moving with the power of my heart,’ he continues. ‘The pain was agonising, and I was terrified I was about to have a heart attack.’
Somehow, he got through the song, then crawled backstage, where an ambulance was called.
‘It took half an hour because when the control centre heard my age, they downgraded it from an emergency,’ he says. However, a monitor revealed his heart rate was 250 beats per minute. A normal rate for a healthy young man is 65-80.
‘I’d been suffering from minor episodes of heart pounding since my early 20s, and I’d seen my GP several times who told me not to worry about it,’ says Alessandro.
‘Previously my heart rate always returned to normal after a couple of hours, and I was sure it would this time. Luckily, the paramedics didn’t listen to me.’
In hospital, doctors administered morphine for the vice-like chest pain, while trying unsuccessfully to bring down Alessandro’s heart rate with drugs. After 45 minutes, he was still struggling for breath, and doctors feared he was about to have a potentially fatal heart attack.
They told him he needed emergency treatment under general anaesthetic — electric shocks would be used to stop then start his heart again, in the hope this would ‘reset’ it. ‘I knew from their faces that they might not be able to start my heart again,’ recalls Alessandro,
The procedure worked, and the next morning he was told he was suffering from Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, which affects the electrical circuitry controlling heartbeats.
Alessandro, had been born with extra electrical pathways in the heart. Occasionally, electrical signals travelled down them, causing his heart to contract much faster.
Every year, 600 young people die from conditions affecting the heart’s electrical activity.
It’s not known how many people are living with these problems, as most, are only diagnosed when they become life-threatening. His symptoms got suddenly worse after he’d been performing in LA with his twin brother Adriano and their sister Francesca, 26, as the rock band Miccoli. Late nights and partying could have triggered his collapse, as people with extra, or distorted, electrical pathways are sensitive to the stimulation of adrenaline, explains Sanjay Sharma, professor of inherited cardiac disease and sports cardiology. ‘If their lifestyle tends to include a lot of alcohol, caffeine, lengthy exertion or lack of sleep, it can increase their adrenaline levels and that can exacerbate the symptoms of their condition, in extreme cases to a fatal level.’ Problems with the heart’s electrical circuits are also thought to have a genetic link. Alessandro’s father has had atrial fibrillation, a faulty heart rhythm, for most of his life, while his grandfather died of a heart attack at 73.
After Alessandro was rushed to hospital in June 2009, his brother was found to be suffering from a very mild form of tachycardia — rapid heartbeat — which didn’t need treatment; his sister is not affected.
ALESSANDRO was put on flecainide acetate, a drug to control his heart rate, but suffered bad side-effects. His cardiologist then suggested cardiac ablation, where the extra electrical circuitry is burnt away, stopping the faulty messages being sent.
This treatment is safe and has a high success rate of up to 95 per cent, says Professor Sharma.
Alessandro was unlucky. He had the operation in early 2010, but two months later was rushed to hospital with a heart rate of 250. Doctors had to use electric shocks again to ‘reset’ it. A second ablation was out of the question, as patients have to wait at least three months between them to allow for healing.
So Alessandro was sent home. ‘Miccoli was on the verge of breaking into the big time, and I was being told to take it easy,’ he says. ‘I told them I hadn’t pushed my GP for a referral to a cardiologist because I thought a heart condition was something that happened to old men,’ says Alessandro. ‘ But up to eight young people a week die from conditions such as mine.’
In December 2010, he had a second ablation. It didn’t work, and he also developed atrial fibrillation, which affects electrical activity in a different part of the heart. In other words, he had two electrical disorders.
He was put on beta-blockers until he could have a third operation, which cured the atrial fibrillation but not the Wolff-Parkinson’s-White. Finally, in December 2011, a fourth operation destroyed the remaining rogue electrical pathways. He no longer needs medication. And Miccoli have secured a record deal.