Each year, more than 454,000 people in the U.S. are hospitalized with atrial fibrillation, the most common type of treated heart arrhythmia. It also contributes to 158,000 deaths each year. Perhaps most startling is that an estimated one in three people don’t know they have atrial fibrillation (also known as AFib).
For many years, Jim Kaveney was one of those people, yet it’s a condition he was diagnosed with when he was 38. A former college athlete, Kaveney didn’t have the common risk factors for AFib, such as obesity or Type 2 diabetes. But there were early signs that something was wrong as well as a risk factor he missed. Now, he’s on a mission to share his journey so others can learn from it.
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The First Sign Something Was Wrong
Kaveney says he has always lived an active lifestyle and in college, he was on his university’s crew team. As part of their training, Kaveney and his crewmates had to wear heart rate monitors and maintain a consistent heart rate between 130 and 135 beats per minute while training. “Sometimes, my heart rate would jump up to 190 and then it would go back down to 130 without me changing anything,” Kaveney says. This was the first sign that something significant was off with his heart.
At the time, Kaveney wasn’t too concerned. After all, he was a young, healthy college student. He didn’t think about his heart health until years later when he was in his late 30s. “Sometimes, I’d have to get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and I would get dizzy. I had to cling to the walls trying not to fall,” he says. The symptoms would come and go and Kaveney put off seeing a doctor. One morning, he got out of bed and fainted, falling right to the ground. His wife told him he needed to go to the doctor.
Kaveney made an appointment with his primary care doctor, who did an EKG. He also gave Kaveney a heart rate monitor to wear at home for the next several days. It was through these tests that his doctor was able to see that Kaveney had atrial fibrillation.
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Risk Factors for Atrial Fibrillation That Are Often Overlooked
How did Kaveney—who was healthier than the average person—get AFib? While exercising in general is good for the heart, after being diagnosed, Kaveney learned that too much exercise was a risk factor. According to scientific research, vigorously exercising between five and seven days a week in people younger than 50 increases the risk of AFib.
Additionally, Kaveney realized he likely had a family history of AFib. “My father had a bunch of mini-strokes during his life,” Kaveney says. Now that he knows more about AFib, he believes his father was one of the many people who didn’t know they had AFib. “Later in his life, my father was diagnosed with vascular dementia and there is a link between AFib and getting vascular dementia,” Kaveney says, giving one reason why he believes his dad had it.
Other risk factors for AFib include obesity, type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease, heart failure, coronary artery disease, COPD, sleep apnea and hyperthyroidism, none of which Kaveney had himself.
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Living with Atrial Fibrillation
To manage his AFib, Kaveney’s cardiologist prescribed him a beta blocker, but it suppressed his heart rate so much that it made Kaveney feel weak. “With my cardiologist’s permission, I weaned myself off it and then switched to a calcium beta blocker, which I have been able to tolerate better,” Kaveney says.
Over the years, Kaveney has had several operations, including cardiac ablation (which is a medical procedure used to treat irregular heart rhythms) and cardioversion (when medical panels are used to shock a heart back to beating normally). He was also given a pacemaker implant to manage tachy-brady syndrome, which causes multiple six second pauses between heartbeats and can be life-threatening.
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All of this is to say, that managing his heart health has been a journey, but it’s one that saved his life and now Kaveney’s prognosis is good. “My final [operation] was in 2019 and I have been in the clear ever since,” he says. Now, he says he prioritizes his heart health by eating heart-healthy foods, minimizing alcohol, walking regularly (he says he walks roughly 25 miles a week) and regular strength training.
It’s also led to a career change. Kaveney has written a book, Unlimited Heart, and founded a wellness company called Unlimited Heart Health & Wellness, aimed at helping health professionals come together to better treat AFib.
His health journey is a good reminder to take any health symptoms you’re experiencing seriously—including heart rate irregularities similar to what Kaveney experienced in college or the dizzy spells he had in his 30s. Additionally, if you have a family history of heart attacks, strokes or other cardiovascular conditions, seeing a cardiologist can help you become aware of your own health risks and how to mitigate them.
Knowledge is power and the more you know about your own body, the better you can take care of it. Kaveney is living proof!
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Sources
- Jim Kaveney, founder of Unlimited Heart Health & Wellness and author of Unlimited Heart.
- About Atrial Fibrillation. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- Afib. Cleveland Clinic
- Exercise and Atrial Fibrillation: Some Good News and Some Bad News. Galen Medical Journal. 2018
- Atrial Fibrillation, Cognitive Decline and Dementia. European Cardiology Review. 2016
- Cardiac ablation. Mayo Clinic
- Cardioversion. Mayo Clinic
- Tachycardia-bradycardia syndrome: Electrophysiological mechanisms and future therapeutic approaches (Review). International Journal of Molecular Medicine. 2017
