First degree heart block (ie a PR interval > 0.2) is not a marker of mild ‘cardio’ (NB: it’s cardiac) injury. It does not cause syncope. It is a reflection of electrical timing between the cardiac chambers. It is not an echocardiogram or a RHC and will tell you nothing about the anatomy or physiology of a person’s heart other than timing. It is not a full electrophysiological study either.
There is no such entity as ‘mild cardio injury’ and I suggest you stop spreading nonsense. Pilots already have strict medical guidance for health and unexplained syncope is not something that is hand-waved away.
>There is no such entity as ‘mild cardio injury’ and I suggest you stop spreading nonsense. Pilots already have strict medical guidance for health and unexplained syncope is not something that is hand-waved away.
A PR interval greater than 0.2 is considered "First-Degree Atrioventricular Block" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...), which "occurs as a consequence of disease in the AV node and is common in older patients." How does something indicating disease in the atrioventricular node not constitute mild cardiac injury? According to that page: "Recent data from the Framingham cohort suggest that in the long term, patients with first-degree AV block have a significantly higher risk of requiring pacemaker implantation and have a higher mortality rate." Would not this increased risk of severe events also constitute an increased risk of mild events like temporarily fainting?
>Pilots already have strict medical guidance for health and unexplained syncope is not something that is hand-waved away.
Those strict guidelines were made less strict in 2022 by increasing the cutoff for PR interval, and the following year we're seeing an increase in flight incidents.
That's a symptom effectively, AV block is just ascribing a name to that description, it's not a disease or injury itself, though yes there may be some underlying cause of it.
It's not like they accidentally started permitting it, because if the rule was 'now pilots with first degree AV block are good to go' is the same thing as saying 'now pilots with PR interval >0.2s ...'.
Presumably they determined it's not a significant indicator of anything sufficiently bad or imminent in the 0.2-0.3 range.
First degree heart block (ie a PR interval > 0.2) is not a marker of mild ‘cardio’ (NB: it’s cardiac) injury. It does not cause syncope. It is a reflection of electrical timing between the cardiac chambers. It is not an echocardiogram or a RHC and will tell you nothing about the anatomy or physiology of a person’s heart other than timing. It is not a full electrophysiological study either.
There is no such entity as ‘mild cardio injury’ and I suggest you stop spreading nonsense. Pilots already have strict medical guidance for health and unexplained syncope is not something that is hand-waved away.