Coroner David Crerar said her Coca-Cola consumption had given rise to cardiac arrhythmia, a condition when the heart beats too fast or too slow.
By one line of thinking, it should have been an easy case, because the patient was said to have died of an arrhythmia, a type of heart problem that Vioxx has not been shown to cause.
Wolfe, in contrast, grouped together a smorgasbord of heart problems that are harder to diagnose, such as angina, arrhythmia and heart failure, a weakening of the heart muscle.
She had to be rushed to a hospital for an overnight stay after suffering a cardiac arrhythmia during an experiment.
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If it detects a severe arrhythmia, the device is designed to shock the heart, causing it to revert to normal rhythm.
Later that evening he collapsed at Brixton police station suffering from a heart arrhythmia, which was the medical cause of Mr Rigg's death.
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Normally, a holiday heart arrhythmia isn't fatal, and in fact it usually fades on its own.
Abnormal beating or arrhythmia is best seen on a long electrocardiogram often called a rhythm strip.
If an arrhythmia is mild, it delivers a mild signal that may not even be detected by the patient, or that may be felt as a fluttering sensation.
Implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) are small battery-powered devices that can deliver a small electric shock to the heart in response to a life-threatening arrhythmia (when the heart starts beating rapidly and inefficiently).
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The electrical activity fails to die away properly, and moves around the muscle in a turbulent pattern causing an arrhythmia known as ventricular fibrillation.
Vollmer had the symptoms of long Q-T Syndrome, a condition that often leads to heart arrhythmia and sudden cardiac arrest.
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According to Dr. Sana Al-Khatib, lead researcher of the study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, ICDs often are recommended as a primary prevention tactic for patients who are at high risk for a cardiac arrest or life-threatening arrhythmia, but who have not yet suffered from these symptoms.
And although EPA attributed her heart problem to PM2.5 in a published report, no one ever bothered to warn subsequent subjects of cardiac arrhythmia risk.
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Sciolaro liked a distinctive feature that would increase the pulse of the heart's top chamber in case of arrhythmia.
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