Welcome to Helix Talk, an educational podcast for healthcare students and providers covering real-life clinical pearls, professional pharmacy topics, and drug therapy discussions.

This podcast is provided by pharmacists and faculty members at Rosal Franklin University College of Pharmacy.

This podcast contains general information for educational purposes only. This is not

professional advice and should not be used in lieu of obtaining advice from a qualified

health care provider. And now on to the show. Welcome to Helix Talk episode 62. I'm your

co-host Dr. King. I'm Dr. Sheerman. And I'm Dr. Patel. Today's title is called

Devices, Not Drugs, Stroke Risk Reduction in Atrial Fibrillation. So we'll be talking about

using devices as opposed to antiquagulants to prevent strokes in patients with Aphid.

And I think the best way to kind of kick off this episode is to introduce you to a patient case. The patient that we're talking about today is Frank.

So Frank is a fictional 75-year-old male who presented to his primary care office,

we'll say at Dr. Patel's office, with palpitations and anxiety.

He's been feeling it for weeks, so this is not acute onset a fib.

It's either unknown duration or kind of a chronic a fib.

His wife finally convinced him to come to his primary care office visit. And he has a past medical history that's relevant for

active alcohol abuse, cirrhosis, thrombocytopenia from his cirrhosis, frequent falls from his

alcohol abuse, diabetes, and hypertension. After a thorough workup of a lot of different things, it's discovered that he does, in fact,

have aphib, and that is what's causing his palpitations and anxiety problems.

So essentially, there's two problems here to worry about with atrial fibrillation.

The first one is going to be about heart rate or rhythm management.

So the ventricular heart rate can be fast.

And when that happens, patients can feel these palpitations in their chest.

They kind of pounding out of my chest.

...