palpitations
Meaning of palpitations: The heart is normally silent to its owner, so noticing it at all is what turns an ordinary beat into a symptom.
Definition of palpitations
Palpitations are an unwanted awareness of one's own heartbeat, felt as pounding, racing, fluttering or a skipped beat in the chest, throat or neck. The sensation is a symptom rather than a diagnosis, and it often accompanies a completely normal rhythm. It arises when the beat becomes stronger, faster, irregular, or simply more noticeable than usual.
What do they feel like?
Descriptions vary far more than the underlying rhythms do. Common accounts are a thump or lurch in the chest, a fluttering like a trapped bird, rapid drumming felt in the neck or ears, or a pause followed by one forceful beat. That last pattern is characteristic of an extra beat. The early beat is too weak to feel, the heart then waits slightly longer than usual, and the beat after it lands hard because the chamber had extra time to fill. What is actually felt is the strong normal beat, not the abnormal one.
What brings them on?
Anything that speeds the heart, strengthens its contraction or interrupts its rhythm. Ordinary triggers include exertion, fear, caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, broken sleep and fever. Medicines that stimulate the circulation do the same, among them decongestants, reliever inhalers and thyroid replacement. Palpitations also accompany conditions that have nothing to do with the heart itself, such as anemia, low blood sugar and panic. Episodes that occur alongside fainting, chest pain or breathlessness, or that begin during physical exertion, carry a different weight, because those combinations can reflect a rhythm that is no longer maintaining blood flow.
| Source | Examples | Typical pattern |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinary triggers | Caffeine, alcohol, stress, exercise | Brief, and settles on its own |
| Extra beats | Early beats from the upper or lower chambers | An isolated thump, skip or pause |
| Sustained rhythm disorder | Atrial fibrillation, supraventricular tachycardia | Fast and continuous, often starting and stopping abruptly |
| Conditions outside the heart | Overactive thyroid, anemia, fever, low blood sugar | Persists while the cause persists |
How is the rhythm identified?
The difficulty is timing, since most episodes are over long before anyone can record them. A tracing taken between episodes is frequently normal, and that does not rule a rhythm disturbance out. Recordings worn for a day or longer, monitors triggered by the wearer during an episode, and small implanted recorders all exist to capture the beat while the symptom is happening. Blood tests look for the causes outside the heart, since hyperthyroidism often announces itself this way. A fast rate confirmed on a tracing is recorded as tachycardia, a term for the measured rate rather than for the sensation.
Also known as
Used in a sentence
The patient reported intermittent palpitations lasting several minutes at a time.
Good to know
The sensation tracks the underlying rhythm poorly, since a harmless extra beat is often felt vividly while a sustained abnormal rhythm can pass unnoticed, so the symptom is interpreted alongside a recording of the heartbeat rather than on its own.
Word origin
Where “palpitations” comes from
Palpitation comes from the Latin palpitare, meaning to throb or flutter repeatedly, itself from palpare, to touch or stroke.