What are the risks of cardioversion treatment

The main risk in all of atrial fibrillation is when your heart is beating irregularly, if there are blood clots and they fire off to the brain and that causes a stroke and the way we reduce that risk is by putting you on blood thinners. Now if you are on blood thinners we reduce that risk massively so before your cardioversion you'll need to be on blood thinners for a period before you'll have the cardioversion and then a period afterwards and that massively reduces the risk of stroke from a cardioversion to very minimal. The other risk is where the pads are placed you can get burn marks where the pads are on the chest because of the shock that's delivered although with the modern pads that's rare. The risks of cardioversion are small. The success of cardioversion, you'll be shocked out of the irregular heart rhythm, the atrial fibrillation, but we don't know how long it will last because we've not changed anything inside. We've just shocked the heart back to normal. So it could last a year, a month, a minute, we won't know. We could have medications which try and keep your heart in normal rhythm and that's usually what's done. You continue on your medications even after your cardioversion for a period to see how you feel once you're in normal rhythm.