Human Heart Hitting Six Hundred

The fastest heartbeat ever recorded in the medical literature was about 600 beats per minute in a 57-year-old quadriplegic man hospitalized in Massachusetts in 2012. He came in with chest pressure and a history of a prior heart attack and quadriplegia from a car crash 10 years earlier. On the third hospital day, he was found to have an extreme tachyarrhythmia lasting about 20 seconds with an average ventricular rate of roughly 600 beats per minute. His rhythm then returned to normal on its own; he underwent urgent catheterization, recovered, and was discharged.

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