February is Heart Health Month and a common condition is atrial fibrillation - as much as six million Americans are diagnosed with this type of abnormal heart beat. As Health Reporter Erin Billups explains, there may be an easy way to treat A-fib, a cure for many. 

The normal adult heart beats 60 to 100 times a minute. Jim Pritchard's was beating more than twice that rate, at as much as 225 times a minute.

"It's uncomfortable, it could last anywhere from a second to an hour. Your heart is out of rhythm, shortness of breath, headache, lightheaded," he says.

Jim had telltale symptoms of atrial fibrillation. He was hospitalized for a week, and placed on several medications for nearly a year because he was at a higher risk for a stroke.]

"When the heart is not beating regularly. When it's fibrillating, then blood pools and clots can form then those can travel to the brain and cause stroke," says Dr. Vivek Reddy, Cardiac Arrhythmia Service Director at The Mount Sinai Hospital.

Like Pritchard, many with what's called A-fib are placed on medication or they undergo a procedure called ablation. Doctors use lasers to burn tiny areas in the heart that are sending the abnormal electrical impulses triggering the rapid beating. But ablation isn't always successful.

"It's difficult to take the catheter and move it to each location and make each lesion adjacent to the previous lesion. This isn't surgery, so we can't see what we're doing," notes Reddy.

But a new device approved by the FDA, the CardioFocus HeartLight catether, gives cardiologists like Dr. Vivek Reddy sight.

"It's a balloon catheter, so it's introduced into the heart, then it's inflated with saline and we push it up against the vein. There's a camera at the back end of the balloon as well as light. So we're actually looking at the tissue that we're going to ablate," explains Reddy.

In a clinical trial Reddy and his colleagues found the HeartLight was easier for doctors to use. The results for new users were just as good as traditional ablation methods - which doctors had performed for years.

Pritchard took part in the trial, and saw immediate results.

"I was cured. Really. No rehab, no follow up, I might have taken some blood thinners, Coumadin for 10 days, cause' you just gotta wean yourself off of that," says Pritchard.

He's now breathing effortlessly - no longer on any medication.

It's a promising advance for a problem millions more Americans are expected to develop as the population ages.