I hate asking medical advice on a board but I’d like an opinion.
Lately my pulse is running very fast. For instance right now I have been just sitting resting for about 1/2 hour and it is about 120.
My doctor said the pulse is strong and nothing appears to be wrong other than I’m stressed. But now this fast pulse is making me a nervous wreck.
My doctor recently switched my blood pressure meds from ziac 2.5 to diovan 80mg. My blood pressure has been 140/90 consistantly and that is about all that is wrong. I have also have menier’s disease.
But in reality how fast is too fast. I really don’t feel bad just this stupid pounding is making me nervous. I go back to see him and if he don’t fix it it’s on to another doctor but in the meantime how fast is too fast.
I mean I used to be able to go 40 minutes 6 times a week on a treadmill work out with weights but the last two weeks, well today I got on the treadmill and in 10 minutes doing 2.0 mph I was at 150 for the pulse rate. I was barely walking. What is up.
BTW a few years back before they put me on ziac I had tests for Thyroid a 48 halter monitor and blood sugar. All normal.
Well, 120 is not too fast, but it’s faster than usual. I assume they’ve done EKG’s and all that to document your heart rate and rhythm, and have determined you’re just doing a sinus tachycardia, and not anything nasty like atrial fibrillation or atrial flutter, or supraventricular tachycardias.
If you’re deconditioned, or taking lots of stimulants (caffiene, nicotine, decongestants like sudafed, phenylpropanolamine, ephedra) it can give you an accelerated pulse.
If you’re dehydrated, or suffering from severe anemia or acute blood loss it’ll be rapid too, but those are less likely causes if its been going on a while.
The short answer: 120 won’t kill you, but it could be a sign something’s not right. For more focused speculation, I’d need more info from you (age, weight, height, general physical condition, smoking history, etc.)
I think your anxiety over your accelerated heartrate is contributing to the problem. It’s a vicious cycle that I have experienced myself.
First of all, stop putting those poisons into yourself!
I believe in the ultimate power of the mind over the body. There are a number of ways to learn the techniques (TM and Biofeedback are examples, but I actually trained myself) and to be sure, it works.
Actually I stopped caffine cold turkey on Oct 31st. No stimulants. The only drug I take was the ziac.
I used to eat A LOT of sugar etc. But I stopped that with the caffine. I dropped my sugar in favor of aspertame.
I have recently lost 12 pounds I am 6’ 220# very well buildt 47C 33W and what gets me is like 3 weeks ago I was having no probs working out. Now I can’t.
And I don’t really feel sick I just feel like the pounding heart is making me nervous. It isn’t like the pulse is weak or irregular it is just fast. BTW I do eat low carbs (50g average a day) and typical protien diet. Kind of a modified atkins diet.
History. I did about 10 years have panic attacks, but this doesn’t appear to be the same. I don’t wake up or get nervous. My folks both died of heart attacks (which is why they wanted me on the blood pressure meds for borderline) and my mother had her thyroid out. But I have been tested time and time again for that and it’s normal.
If 120 ain’t gonna kill me I guess I can cope it’s just hard as now I can hear it pound pound pound and that starts the vicious cycle…
no, 120 ain’t gonna kill ya, but from what you describe, there’s no apparent reason you should be taching along like that. If you were my patient (but you’re not) and I couldn’t find an explanation for it, I’d ask a cardiologist to see you at least once for their input. And maybe another Holter monitor before that, to see what your average rate and rhythm are. Oh, and an exercise test, perhaps a nuclear one would be best, but if your baseline EKG is normal, a regular one would suffice. Dang! One simple question on your part has me ordering hundreds of dollars of tests!
Usually it’s not the fast heartrates that kill, it’s the reasons behind the fast heartrates. Of course, once your rate goes up over 230 or so, it can no longer pump blood effectively, so in those cases, fast rates can be fatal.
It must have been the going off the Ziac as my doctor put me back on the Ziac 2.5mg and the pulse fell back to 93. Still faster than what it was but not as slow as it should be.
He said he will wean me off of it.
To ask another question. How does the beta blocker work? How does the heart become so dependent on it?
Beta blockers block the beta adrenergic receptors of the nervous system. They are found many places thruout the body, but especially are important in the cardiac and circulatory system. The receptors respond to stimulation from epinephrine and norepinephrine, and that’s why these substances work to raise heart rate and blood pressure. Cuz stimulation of said receptors raises the rate and pressure.
Beta blockers fit in the receptor sites without activating them, preventing epinephrine and norepinephrine (and other substances) from activating them. Your body produces these substances, and they do continue to work in the body at other types of receptor sites, but are at least partially blocked out of the beta receptor sites by the blocker.
If you’re completely beta blocked, your heart rate tends to go naturally down to its default setting of about 60 beats a minute, and tends to not rise a lot with stress and exertion. If you’re partially blocked (ie not taking enough to fill all available receptors) your heart rate and BP will dip a bit.
Your body recognizes that the receptors are blocked, so it upregulates them, making the nervous system form lots and lots of the beta receptor sites, so sometimes people who do well on one dose of a beta blocker need to increase it to get the same effect on BP & heartrate they had before.
Suddenly stopping the beta blocker will act to open up all the receptors, now in greater numbers than ever before! Therefore any passing epinephrine molecule has a great chance of finding a beta receptor, and stimulating it to increase the heart rate and BP. Wham, tachycardia!
Eventually the body recognizes it has too many beta receptors, and works to downregulate the number, but this takes time, and the body is exquisitely sensitive to any beta-adrenergic stimulation this entire time. Generally people are weaned off the beta blocker over weeks to avoid this effect.
This is an extremely simplified version, and may be faulted on many technical points, but it’s a fairly good analogy.
thanks for the info on the increase of beta receptors post perscription of a beta blocker (assuming over a time peroid) – I knew the dosage would need to be increased but didn’t know quite why.