Faulty Ecg?

[shoemad]

my 32 year old son recently had an ECG as part of general health check.
As he was walking home, he got a phone call asking him to go back as there were irregularities on the ECG.
They wired him up for another 30 minutes and said everything seemed fine and there must have been some sort of glitch on the original ECG.
He is now worried that something really is wrong particularly as he has been under the weather for a while.
Can ECGs have glitches?
Anyone know anything about them?

[Sqad]

\\\\Can ECGs have glitches? \\\\\

Possible, but very unlikely.

If the repeat ECG was normal...............then it was normal.

\\\\\He is now worried that something really is wrong particularly as he has been under the weather for a while. \\\\\

Can you expand on the above?

[Sqad]

I have been thinking.

A likely cause would be a dispute between medical folks (Doctor and ECG technician) over the interpretation of a pattern. This is not an uncommon situation.

So, to check and reassess, another ECG was taken.

Abnormalities on an ECG are not always due to disease, many are "physiological"...........normal pattern, specific to that patient.

[jno]

I had an ECG recently and was told it showed I'd had a heart attack. After 3 weeks they gave me another one and told me I hadn't. They thought the first result (done at my GP's surgery) was down to operator error.

[woofgang]

Its a long while ago now but DH and I both had ecg's as part of medicals for his company before we went abroad for his job. We had to go back for repeats because there was a problem with the ecg machine. Apparently that day, everybody who was put on the machine appeared to have the same anomaly! They tried a different operator in case it was operator error but it made no difference. So yes, like every other machine, things can go wrong.

[Old_Geezer]

Good to see medical results are so objective, and not reliant on interpretation :-D

[shoemad]

He has been feeling a bit shaky and anxious. Is having blood tests for pain in testicles - has had scan and no lump found.
Waiting for results of blood test ( although he has no idea what they are testing for!)
We are obviously concerned

[alavahalf]

I had an ECG yesterday and the nurse who did it offered the results to a Staff nurse who looked at me and then looked at the results with wide eyes and said we had better do it again !
They didn't say a word until the second lot came through... "False alarm" she said. "You are as right as rain".
So it appears that sometimes the results are wrong !

[Daffy6543]

User error is the main cause for 'glitches' on ECG tests, I've had a few and only two with dodgy readouts, turned out the leads were mixed up in both cases.

[wired]

I had an ECG some years ago and the machine was definately faulty, it was making a terrible sound and the results were unreadable, I had to go back a few days later and all was ok, with me and the machine.

[shoemad]

thank you for all the positive comments.
It seems like 'glitches' or errors are quite common.

[Peter Pedant]

In Sqad's world it doesn't often happen

it does in mine

So long as the second ECG is OK I think things are OK. They should be quality assured and I think a repeat and rescrutiny is OK practice. IT does frighten the *** out of the patient tho

MY own particular disappointment was being told my AF had ended - and finding out on re-ECG it hadn't. Answer life time b-blockers and rivaroxaban.

I would therefore prefer the other way around - "something wrong oh oops there isn't"