While alcohol consumption does no good to anyone, it has been claimed that it can actually raise the risk of palpitations in patients with atrial fibrillation. It has been claimed by a team of UCSF that patients who are suffering from atrial fibrillation are as many as four and a half times more likely to face serious palpitations if they are drinking alcohol.

“In a previous publication, we suggested that there was an effect on the electrical activity of the atrium that leads to these arrhythmias but we do need additional studies to prove that”, said senior author Gregory Marcus, MD, Assistant Professor of medicine at the UCSF Division of Cardiology, while claiming that there is a lot to be revealed about how and why such reaction is being experienced by patients.

For the research which was done from September 2004 to March 2011, the team questioned 223 patients with documented cardiac arrhythmia, which means those who are battling with encompasses both atrial fibrillation and supraventricular tachycardia (SVT), and found that some 133 experienced intermittent or paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, or irregular heart palpitations, when they were consuming alcohol.

There is need for extensive study to be done on the same so that some sort of concrete results can be deduced from the same which can be used for clinical applications in the time to come.