Bengaluru: Bradycardia, a fallout of dengue, has afflicted city dengue patients. Relative bradycardia, a notable clinical feature of dengue fever, is now being seen in many patients.
"It’s not just the platelets that are a symptom of this ailment. The heart rate of patients with dengue is also a major concern. One of the complications they go through is Bradycardia, in which the heart rate decreases," says Dr Bindumathi PL, Professor and HOD Sapthagiri Medical College.
"There are patients whose platelets become normal, but their heart rate is low, despite proper platelet count and that is a concern as well," she adds.
For some people, a slow heart rate does not cause any problems. It can be a sign of being very fit. Healthy young adults and athletes often have heart rates of less than 60 beats a minute.
In other people, bradycardia is a sign of a problem with the heart's electrical system. It means that the heart's natural pacemaker isn't working right or that the electrical pathways of the heart are disrupted.
"Relative Bradycardia is a clinical feature of dengue in which the heart rate goes down, but we need to worry only if the patient is an elderly patient, pregnant woman, obese or very young children in whom the severity of dengue is higher," says Dr Pavan Mangalore, Consultant Emergency Medicine, Columbia Asia Referral Hospital, Yeshwanthpur.
He adds, "It is a part of the disease which should not be clinically significant. And it should not cause panic as it is a process of disease. Unless the heart rate is less than 50 people should not panic."
What is bradycardia?
Relative bradycardia has been reported in many infectious diseases, including typhoid fever, Legionnaires' disease, psittacosis, typhus, leptospirosis, malaria. Also, during the 2005 Singapore outbreak, relative bradycardia was observed in several patients with dengue fever.
