New 'life-changing' AFib treatment helps Las Vegas patients

Highlighting the progress of health care in southern Nevada is a top priority for me.

Now, I'm learning how local doctors are the first in the state to perform a procedure on a condition that affects millions of Americans: Atrial Fibrillation known as AFib.

I spent the day at Mountain View Hospital to learn how this innovation could be a game-changer for our community.

“It kind of changes your way of wanting to live,” said Marilyn Fleischman.

She says it all started with an irregular heartbeat in 2017.

She learned she had Afib, where the heart beats fast and unevenly, causing fatigue, shortness of breath, and sometimes chest pain. It also increases the risk of stroke.

“Once your heart starts to flutter like it does, it’s there you can function but you are not yourself,” Fleischman said.

She described to me how medication helped at first, but that it got worse over time.

“There [were] many sleepless nights,” she said.

Fleischman was set to get a traditional treatment that uses extreme cold, but her cardiac electrophysiologist, Dr. Niuton Koide says a new and more effective treatment was exactly what she needed.

“It is one of the latest technologies for AFib ablation," Dr. Koide said.

Mountain View Hospital is the first in Nevada to get this new treatment, called pulsed-field ablation.

The procedure is complicated, so I asked Dr. Koide to explain how it works, which you can see in this video:

“We know where to go, we place the catheter into position and blast the tissue with the pulsed field ablation,” he said.

Dr. Koide tells me the procedure stops the heart cells causing irregular heartbeats.

Fleischman isn't alone when it comes to suffering from AFib.

I asked Dr. Koide how many people he sees a day with this heart problem?”

“I see no less than 10 patients a day with AFib,” he said.

He says this technique is safer for repairing nearby tissues than traditional methods which use extreme heat or cold.

He says can treat more than twice as many patients daily.

On Wednesday morning, Fleischman was his first Nevada patient. She says it changed her life forever.

“It was very easy, the recovery was great and other than being a little sore I'm fine," she said.

Dr. Koide says he hopes this new technology will transform the lives of many more patients.