So my current loop recorder has shown I get ventricular ectopics.
My cardiologist doesn't seem overly concerned at the moment but when I have these I experience a sharp stabbing pain in the left side of the chest.
Has anyone else had similar experiences with PVCs, should I be worried?
With the caveat that I’m not medically qualified…
PVCs are generally only considered of concern if the burden of ectopics (PVCs and/or PACs) being experienced each day is 10% or more, so several thousand in number, or if you’re getting runs of three or more PVCs in a row without any normal beats in between, as this would be considered a ventricular arrhythmia, and therefore something to be concerned about. If they’re occurring in (relative) isolation and well below the 10% threshold, then all ectopics regardless of where in the heart they originate from are usually deemed to be benign. Which is all well and good unless you’re the one living with them. I have both PVCs and PACs, with my PVCs often manifesting like someone has thumped me in the chest. It’s a real thud, almost painful sometimes, and unpleasant with it. They’re sometimes positional for me, so I can fairly reliably ‘give myself’ a PVC by bending forward and down as if to pick something up off the floor, but as is the puzzle of ectopics, sometimes they happen for no clear reason at all.
If your consultant isn’t concerned - and you’ve told him they’re painful - then I would take that as reassurance that they’re just an unsettling nuisance that you will eventually learn to live with. The current thinking from recent studies is that most people probably have ectopics, it’s just they’re not aware of them, and we do know that once you become aware of them, your body becomes sensitised and it’s a bit of a vicious circle from then on: the more ectopics you notice, the more you notice even more. The reality is that other than to say when they’re of concern or not, we still understand very little about how or why they occur.
That is so well explained! My Ectopics are 6% and over time I have learned to live with it. When you know what they are and that no doctor is bothered it just turns into every day life but took a couple of years to get to this understanding and learning to just cope with it. Good Luck
Ventricular standstill and laxatives
Left ventricular hypertrophy
premature ventricular contraction 
Ventricular septal defect
Ectopics
