My symptoms come and go. How will the doctor screen me for those

It's quite common that when atrial fibrillation first presents, it presents in a paroxysmal format. That means that the symptoms do come and go. There will be periods of time when the heart is in an abnormal rhythm with atrial fibrillation, but there will be other times the heart is back in a normal rhythm and the only way to ascertain whether you have atrial fibrillation is to try and record the heart at the time that the heart is going into atrial fibrillation and in order to do that we need to record the heart for a long period of time and this is the basis of ambulatory monitoring and the longer we record for the more likely we are to pick up episodes of Atrial Fibrillation.