Hi, my name is Justin Edward. I'm a second year medical student at NYIT-COM in Old Westbury, New York. Today I'm going to be presenting the utility of BARDI-DX ECG monitoring to assess the impact of anxiety on self-reported cardiac symptoms, a pressing matter. The BARDI-DX is a wearable ECG monitor typically worn for two weeks when prescribed to a patient. It is a non-invasive means for providers to analyze ECG strips from patients that have frequent arrhythmias. Patients are typically given this to assess the etiology of symptoms such as palpitations, syncope, or any other symptoms that can be deemed cardiac in nature. It is a P-wave centric monitoring function that helps discern between various different types of arrhythmias that patients may have. Patients have the ability to press a button that is located centrally on the device to indicate whether they are having symptoms at any specific time. The BARDI monitor records all arrhythmias that the patient may have while they're wearing it and it also records the ECG strip whenever the patient presses the button indicating they're having symptoms. This is extremely useful because it allows providers to correlate the patient's symptoms to a given arrhythmia event or lack thereof. It gives us very useful data especially in treating the group of patients that we analyzed, patients that have anxiety. Symptoms of anxiety are shortness of breath, palpitations, chest pain. These symptoms are very close to symptoms from arrhythmias and can be deemed cardiac in nature. So when you have patients with cardiac disease as well as anxiety it becomes a difficulty to discern whether their symptoms are from their anxiety or symptoms are from their cardiac disease. So we use the BARDI here to allow us to do that. So we analyzed 63 patients between July 2019 and May of 2024 and we separated these patients into two groups. There was the anxiety group which we include any patients with the following diagnoses, generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Then we had our control group which was the non-anxiety group. We analyzed the total number of arrhythmias the patients had in our analysis, the total number of times each group pressed the button, the total number of button presses that did correspond to an arrhythmia, and a total number of button presses that did not have a corresponding arrhythmia. We decided that any button presses that failed to correspond to an arrhythmia were deemed non-cardiac in nature. So out of our 63 patients, 25 fit our criteria for the anxiety group and 38 of our patients fell into the control group. The average monitoring time for patients wearing the BARDI was 9.9 days. In our data there was no significance for the total arrhythmic events, total number of button presses, and button presses that did correspond to an arrhythmia between the two groups. However, there was a significant difference in button presses that did not correspond to arrhythmias. Patients with anxiety were more likely to press the button without having an arrhythmia than the control group was. There were 302 non-arrhythmia button presses in the anxiety group and 193 button presses in the control group which gave us a p-value of 0.043 which is less than 0.05 which was considered statistically significant for our study. This analysis was done using an unpaired student's t-test. Overall, the BARDI monitor helped us to discern whether patient self-reported symptoms and anxiety patients had a cardiac etiology. Some limitations of our study were its small sample size and uneven male to female ratio. So future studies should increase your sample size in order to achieve a more robust understanding the effect anxiety has on self-reported cardiac symptoms. Thank you very much.

BARDI-DX ECG monitor

anxiety

cardiac symptoms

arrhythmias

medical study