The skeptical cardiologist has had several of his readers submit stories and tracings of AliveCor Mobile ECG recordings which yield unclassified or unreadable recordings. In some cases this is due to excess noise but a lot of these tracings suffer from low voltage: the height of the tracing is very small.
John, a skepcard reader, is typical.
Recently, he noted his heart was racing and made an AliveCor recording which came back interpreted by the app as normal
Three hours later he made a second recording which has drastically lower voltage: the only deflections visible are tiny QRS complexes, the p waves have disappeared. I think this is also normal sinus rhythm but because p waves can’t be seen this came back uninterpretable and if there were any irregularity AliveCor would have called it atrial fibrillation:
John has a theory on the cause of some of his low voltage recordings which I shall reveal in a subsequent post after testing it.
In the meantime, if any readers have suggestions as to causes of low voltage recordings or have noted similar issues please comment below or send recordings and observations to DRP@theskepticalcardiologist.com.
Voltagophilistically Yours,
-ACP
