Do you know how long it takes caffeine to be thoroughly gone from the body?
Days? Weeks? A month?
Physical withdrawal symptoms set in within a day or two. I don’t know how long it takes to be completely gone, but it appears most of it’s out of your system within 48 hours.
Are you a mormon scared of a drug test?
On a serious note, The half-life of caffeine in your body is about 6 hours. That means that if you consume a big cup of coffee with 200 mg of caffeine in it at 3:00 PM, by 9:00 PM about 100 mg of that caffeine is still in your system.
Well hell!
My heart has been going flippity-flop and the cardiologist insists I go off caffeine. I have had NONE since August 2. NO CHOCOLATE for more than two weeks and my heart is still doing it.
He can’t find anything wrong with my heart. I am already on Toprol XL and he said if I take any more I might pass out. Great!
Also, I don’t drink, so that’s not it.
I NEED CHOCOLATE. NOW.
I think I also need a new doctor.
Doesn’t appear to stay around too long at all. Looks like it would be virtually all gone in 48 hours or less.
Studies reveal that peak plasma levels of caffeine occur from 15 to 60 minutes after ingestion. Studies on the optimal time of pre-event “loading” for ergogenesis also ranged from 15 to 60 minutes. Blood half-life of caffeine was as low as two and as high as seven hours in the literature I reviewed. The doses needed for an ergogenic effect ranged from 3 mg of caffeine per kilogram of body weight to 15 mg of caffeine per kilogram of body weight.
Is half life the correct way to model how caffine leaves the body? I have never heard of using half life for these sorts of things.
IANAD. I am experienced in the heart going flippity-flop department, however.
Has your doctor documented what type of situation is making your heart go flippity flop? Has he listened as it occurred? Better yet, has he documented it via an electrocardiogram, so that he can identify the particular type of arrythmia that is occuring?
If your arrythmia doesn’t appear on command while you’re in the cardiologist’s office, has he ordered an event monitor or a Holter monitor to see what is actually happening when it does occur?
If he hasn’t, perhaps you might want to ask him about this, or consider a new doctor. If you’re changing, you might want to consider an electrophysiologist — a subspecialist within cardiology who is expert at diagnosing electrical problems within the heart causing arrythmias.
There are lots and lots of different types of arrythmias, with varying causes and treatments, so the experiences of one person are not at all relevant to another’s situation. In my own particular circumstances with my own particular ailment, (paroxysmal ventricular tachycardia), I have found that caffeine intake in general is typically not a trigger for me all by itself. If, however, I have some when my heart is already in a “twitchy” mode or when another one of my risk factors is in effect, this does seem to increase the likelihood of me of having an attack. (For instance, I have learned the hard way not to mix Frappuccinos and public speaking.) Your mileage most certainly will vary.
As an additional anecdote, l found that Toprol XL made me feel worse rather than better. Since I normally have a fairly slow resting heart rate, even a very small dose of Toprol XL will drop my heart rate precipitously low — into the upper 30’s to lower 40’s, leaving me feeling as if I’m going to pass out.
I was a much happier camper when I saw an electrophysiologist and got an accurate diagnosis of my problem rather than just having my regular cardiologist put me on a beta blocker as a sort of a scatter-gun approach to handling the problem in lieu of (or until) finding the accurate diagnosis.
So, continue to follow your doctor’s advice — but if your instincts tell you that this particular doctor is not helping you out, you would be wise to seek a second opinion.
Good luck on this.
Thank you so much. I am going to consider that kind of doctor.
I have been having this feeling very occasionally since I was 12-13 (I’m 46 now), but I could never describe it right and it wouldn’t happen when a doctor was listening.
As I have gotten older it happens more often. I even had the Holter monitor a few years ago but it didn’t happen in that 24-hour period.
Then, about 1.5 years ago this started happening a lot (2-3 times per minute). I have had the Holter monitor, EKG, echo and the stress test after being injected with radioactive whatever, and sitting there on this thing while it took pictures of me in a circle, once with a resting pulse and once after I had been on the treadmill. I was doing all these tests with a bunch of fat old men. Me and a bunch of fat old men taking turns getting all these test. And signing a form that says I realize I might drop dead when the injected me with the radioactive stuff which came in a silver tube.
The Holter monitor showed lots and lots of PVC’s, a couple of episodes of tachycardia and at least one episode of bradycardia.
This is not important, according to the doctor. After the tests he could not find anything “wrong” with me, so he put me on Toprol XL (but only after trying to go off caffeine for two weeks-which I said I did but it was a white lie). After two weeks I found it did start working. So for a year it worked, I had some episodes last spring, then about three weeks ago it’s going nuts again. I went to see him and he insists it’s caffeine.
All the other times I made an effort to go off of caffeine, but never completely. This time I have. Well, I had about 1/2 oz. of chocolate over a week ago, but that’s it.
I think that most of his patients have serious problems so he doesn’t think mine is that big a deal. But it is a big deal to me. When it is happning some place like at the movies or a concert I start getting scared that I’m going to have to leave.
It’s very scary to me.
But I feel stupid to bother a specialist with my problem.
This all started about 3 years ago — I was 41 at the time. My family doctor listened to my symptoms, and surmised that I might have had supraventricular tachycardia, and ordered and event monitor, which effectively turned me over to cardiologist #1. I really disliked the first cardiologist I got sent to. Fortunately, since he had trouble interpreting the arrythmia he called an electrophysiologist for a consult, so I got to leave him behind at that point.
I really, really loved the event monitor as a diagnostic tool. My particular tachycardia tended to come on AFTER I had exercised. As it turns out, certain areas of my heart are very sensitive to changes in my adrenaline levels. The sudden drop-off in adrenaline would trigger these particular areas in my right ventricular outflow tract to say “Hey, wait! I want to keep going!” and ignore the overall pacing of the heart and take off on their own. When I felt my pulse, it felt as if I was skipping beats. That’s because that the beats that the ventricles did on their own did not pump blood out to the rest of the body — hence the skipped beat feeling, and the frequent light-headed “Oooh, I think I’m going to pass out” feeling that came along with it. The event monitor was great because when I felt it happening, I would hit a button, and the monitor would record the ekg over the next 30 seconds, and store that along with the tracing from the 30 seconds prior to my pressing the button. Since my problem never occurred in my doctor’s office, this made all the difference in the world in him being able to make an accurate diagnosis. For instance, he saw that when it was happening, I would sometimes get runs of as many as 12-15 PVCs in a row, running my heart rate up to 250 or so, and he could see the waveform of the ekg that suggested what particular problem was causing it.
Since he was able to make an accurate diagnosis (right ventricular outflow tract ventricular tachycardia), there was a treatment. He did a catheter ablation to burn out some of the trouble-making spots in my heart. It has improved my situation a good deal. It did not entirely cure it, because once he burned out the major trouble-making areas of my heart, some additional underachieving troublemaker areas have come out of the woodwork to take their place. The frequency and severity of my attacks have been markedly reduced, however.
It’s very unlikely that you have the same condition I have. However, there are lots of other conditions that could be causing it, and many of them can be treated (some by the same catheter ablation procedure), as long as you know what they are.
I don’t think an electrophysiologist will pooh-pooh your condition. I think the straight cardiologists do because the only tool they really have is to drug you up, which may or may not be of any help to you. It’s easier to tell you it’s no big deal, and to just get over it. The electrophysiologist is more likely to have the tools to diagnose and treat it, and this is what they do.
Actually, I think the electrophysiologist will LIKE having you around as a patient. After dealing with really, really sick people all the time, it’s gotta be pretty rewarding to have a generally healthy person around that they’re able to really help out and make a difference to. My electrophysiologist pretty much told me that at my last appointment. When he came in, he said “Ah, there’s my ‘King of Hearts’ lady. Normally, when I see someone with a chart this thick, it means they’re really pretty sick — you just have all this event monitor stuff.” (“King of Hearts” is the brand name of the event monitor he uses.)
I hope this works out for you. I know how crummy it feels, and how insecure it can make you feel.
Why? That’s what they’re there for. And if you are feeling scared about your heart flip-flopping, the scaredness may be a problem too. Specialists may lay your fears to rest and you may have less of these attacks the less you have fears about them.
IANAD, either, but I’ve had experiences with the flip-floppy things. I wore a heart monitor for two weeks after I finally badgered my doctor into submission (I was 25, and apparently hearts don’t go bad when you’re 25). I had the feeling that my heart was jumping out of my chest at least four times a day, and recorded it all. Sounded like beep beep beep beeeweweeeee-eeeee-eeeeeee pause beep. The results were sent to a specialist, who said I didn’t have anything to worry about. Whew.
That still wasn’t enough for me, oh no, so I researched my heart flip-floppiness, and found out that my kind of problem occurs in 100% of all people. I was just attuned to it because, I dunno, I’m sensitive about the way my body works. I can practically hear the doctors shrugging over the cause.
But now that I’ve had the tests, and had the research to back it up, I’m ignoring the problem and it actually seems to be getting less frequent.
Your problem seems a lot more severe than mine, however. Have you thought about things other than caffeine? Maybe you’ve been putting your body through stress by losing weight because you haven’t been eating so much chocolate. Maybe you get more attacks at certain parts of your monthly cycle. Maybe you haven’t been getting enough sleep.
Like I said, I’m not a doctor, but from what I was reading these stressors can also cause problems. Please see a specialist. It’s much better not to be afraid of your own body.
Oh, also you said you were getting scared that you were going to have to leave public places when that started happening. That sounds like anxiety to me. I’ve been on medication for that for years. Do yourself a favor and get a specialist so you won’t have these fears anymore. Please.
I don’t know what IANAD means.
Thank you YWalker and Elysian.
I was talking about this with a co-worker last Thursday. (administrative assistant) Here is what she said, “I don’t think it is your heart at all. It is menopause. Or it’s acid reflux. Look that up.”
This made me so mad. I didn’t tell her so, but I was very angry about this for the rest of the day. So what if it is caused by menopause? That doesn’t make it okay. Also, as I’ve told her repeatedly, there is no burning or pain. It’s more like a fast heartbeat, a spasm that I sometimes feel up into my throat or down into my intestines, it is like my heart skips a beat. IT IS NOT HEARTBURN.
I live in a suburb of Cleveland we have two wonderful hospitals here. But the local hospital, which is related to one of the big hospitals, sucks. The cardiologist’s office is attached to this smaller hospital.
I have someone who can get me in to a good cardiologist with the Cleveland Clinic. She asked me last week if I wanted her to get me an appointment and I said no. But I think that this week I will ask her to do it for me.
If this is caused by stress, so what? Everyone has stress. I cannot remove stress from my life, although, frankly, my life has a lot less stress than most of the people around me.
It would be so good to figure out that it happens as a result of exercise, or whatever it may be. I have not seen a correlation with anything so far. It happens when I’m sitting still. It happens when I am riding a bike or doing aerobics. It happens when I am performing music. There doesn’t seem to be any one thing causing it.
When I wake up in the morning I think, maybe it is gone today. Then a few minutes later, there it is.
Yes, sometimes I feel I am going to have a panic or anxiety attack, although I have never had one and don’t really know anything about that. I think, what if it doesn’t stop this time?
I feel like no one believes me or they think I am being a hypochondriac.
Another person at work (she was just kidding, I guess) said she would never give up chocolate. She would just live with the heart thing. Well, that is just not true. I love chocolate and I have given it up because I really want this to go away. One person recently told me that I eat more chocolate than anyone he knows. I even went to see Willy Wonka and did not eat any chocoate.
IT IS NOT THE CHOCOLATE. But I have to prove that to the cardiologist.
I do need to lose weight. I have been trying, for these past three weeks, to be more healthy. Going to bed earlier (not tonight…waiting for the clothes to get out of the dryer), drinking more water, exercising a lot, eating right. eating much less sugar. My husband, who is an exercise fanatic, is trying to help me.
Thanks for your support.
The Cleveland Clinic is actually a very good place to go. When I was first researching arrhythmias, I found a lot of good information on their website.
While your coworker is incorrect in saying “It’s not your heart; it’s just menopause (or stress, or whatever),” there could be a small germ of truth in what she’s saying. Menopause can be a trigger for arrhythmia in some women. So can stress. But it’s ridiculous to say “It’s not your heart” when it obviously is.
I personally have found that being short on sleep is one of the big pre-disposing factors for me. I am working on teaching myself that burning the candle on both ends is just not a luxury I can afford anymore. The time I gain by staying up late and shorting myself on sleep will be more than lost if I make up for it later by having it trigger a bout of v-tach in me.
Although my primary trigger has always been exercise (or, more typically, the aftermath of exercise), I have had it happen at other times, just as you have mentioned. And I can (and have) stressed myself into it an attack of it, so gaining more knowledge about it, and fearing it less, has helped me as well.
Another interesting thing I’ve found out (which again, is probably just my own personal experience of this, and not necessarily applicable to others) is that bradycardia and v-tach leave me with a very similar feeling, even though they are opposite ends of the arrhythmia spectrum. I learned this when I was taking the Toprol XL. I happen to have an atheletic-style heart rate monitor around (I used to teach fitness walking class for the Y, and used it to gauge training levels), and the skippy-beat feeling I get when I’m in full v-tach mode of 180 beats per minute or more is remarkably similar to the skippy-beat feeling I got when the Toprol was dropping me back to the upper 30’s. In both cases, there is a skipped beat feeling, plus a huge feeling of unease that comes over me (probably as my brain is realizing “You know, we’re not getting too much oxygen up here…”). My wise-ass guess on why they feel so similar is because the end results are similar — you’re getting shortchanged on the number of full effective heart beats per minute.
By all means, since you’ve got such a good resource available locally, I would use it. Go see an electrophysiologist at the Cleveland Clinic. Just knowing more about my condition has made me much more at ease with what’s going on, and better able to manage it. In addition to my doctor, I also have access to his nurse, who is fantastic. They are both great about answering my questions, and treat me like I have a brain and can be relied upon as a responsible partner in my own care rather than someone who just needs to be patted on the head and told “Here, go take this pill.”
Bravo.
IANAD = I am not a doctor.
You are not a hypochondriac. That’s just plain silly, and stop thinking it right now! My vote is that you have been putting your body under a lot of stress by losing weight and worrying about your heart, and that’s why it’s happening more often. But go to the specialist and get an expert’s opinion, by all means. YOU ARE NOT WASTING THEIR TIME. You want to know who wastes their time? Great-grannies who want to talk about what Dr. X said in 1947 about their husband’s piles. You have a legitimate worry, and you should get it looked at.
Okay, I’m really not trying to pad my posts. I just read YWalker’s post where she (?) lists her triggers and I thought I’d list my for comparison. You said you didn’t know why they were increasing in frequency. I didn’t either, until I stopped looking at what I was doing at the time I would have the problem and started looking at what I had done the week I was having more attacks than usual.
- Dieting
- No sleep
- Worrying
- Much more caffeine than usual. I drink tons of tea a day and usually don’t have problems, but if I switch to coffee…oh boy.
Strangely enough for me, exercise tends to decrease the amount of attacks I have each day. I have decided to quit dieting and concentrate on exercise, and that seems to be working very well. I still have attacks occasionaly, but the frequency has lessened significantly.
This is not to say that my triggers bear any resemblence to yours. I am putting them out there to maybe clue you in on some possible problems.
I did think this started up again as a delayed reaction to stress…I had gone to the GYN and he felt an abnormality in one breast. He told me to get the mamm and the ultrasound at the same time and to see a breast specialist. I went for the mamm and ultrasound, the radiologist came in and did the ultrasound over again, and she told me it was a cyst.
That evening my heart started going out of whack. After I was told I was okay. So I thought it was from that stress.
Two weeks later (last Saturday) I saw the breast specialist (at the Cleveland Clinic–maybe the best in Cleveland) and he told me it was a cyst and showed me on the films.
So, stress over. Heart still not normal.
I have been going to Weight Watchers all summer and lost 1-2 pounds. Really. I can’t follow the rules. I just can’t. I have learned a lot of things there, but I’m not going back. I’m just trying to be healthy now. I think I have lost a pound this week because of lots of bike riding and trying new eating habits. So there hasn’t been some huge weight loss or dieting.
I am an organist and played a big piece of music today which I have known for @ 25 years like the back of my hand. I was a basket case. My hands were shaking and my heart was pounding. I played okay for the congregation’s standpoint, but it was pretty bad by my standards. This has happened to me a couple of times when I play something hard. But…I didn’t get enough sleep last night.
It is weird for me to think I must get x hours of sleep per night, I can’t eat this or that, I can’t do this or that, because of getting older. I don’t feel old! When did that happen?
I also have a heart rate monitor for exercise. Before I went on Toprol XL my target range was 114-150. Now I can get my heart up to 114 if I try really hard, but there’s no point in wearing the monitor because my heart is slowed down too much. The funny thing is that I was at a step class at the Y a few days after I had started taking the Toprol XL and couldn’t get my heart rate up to 114. It took me about 20 minutes to remember why it wasn’t working.
So I guess I need to get out my menopause books and actually read them. I don’t think I’m officially in menopause, but whatever. Maybe it’s starting. Lately I can’t remember people’s names and stuff. I’ll say, “That girl who works here, her office is down the hall on the left.” Of course I know who I’m talking about, but her name escapes me for a moment. I really think this is a matter of not being so busy or so scattered.
On Tuesday when I see my friend I will ask her to get me that appointment.
Thanks for your words of advice and explanation and encouragement.