Diagnosis in Just Three Days
First BIOMONITOR III Case in the Nordic region
It started as a fairly typical case: The 79-year-old patient suffered from unexplained dizziness for years. To figure out why, the cardiology team at Sweden’s Kalmar Hospital performed echocardiograms, Holter ECGs and other tests. However, the tests showed normal sinus rhythm and were thus inconclusive. That’s when Dr. Hendrik Schreyer, Dr. David Olsson and Prof. Jörg Carlsson decided to use BIOTRONIK’s recently CE-approved BIOMONITOR III to finally identify the problem – becoming the first team in the Nordic region to inject the new implantable cardiac monitor (ICM).
Just three days later, the monitor detected an arrhythmia. Thanks to daily data transmission via BIOTRONIK Home Monitoring, the hospital soon received the relevant clinical and technical information. The physicians then informed their patient that they had found atrial fibrillation and an asystole with an eight-second pause. Based on the diagnosis, they recommended pacemaker implantation. “She was very pleased to get a call from us after only three days,” says Dr. Schreyer, who performed the injection.
The device detected the problem very reliably. This is important because patients with ICMs often wait around four months until another episode occurs that gives us the information we need to make an accurate diagnosis.
The BIOMONITOR III is designed to monitor a patient’s heart rhythm long-term, transmitting data to the physician on a daily basis, to help them detect arrhythmia. Dr. Schreyer credits the BIOMONITOR III’s signal quality for helping to simplify the diagnosis, noting r-wave amplitudes as high as 2 mV being registered on ECG readouts from the device. “So far, I haven’t experienced another device with such a high signal quality. Most are under 1 [mV].” He also notes the cardiac monitor’s clear p-wave visibility; a particularly important aspect for spotting atrial fibrillation.
The team finished the injection procedure in less than four minutes. Dr. Schreyer says the extra stability the BIOMONITOR III’s tools afford help to ease the procedure, as they allow an implanting physician to steady the main tool with his or her entire hand.
The ease of the injection procedure was quickly apparent to the patient as well. “She was surprised, in the most positive way possible, that she could go home immediately afterwards and had no complaints at all,” says Dr. Schreyer.