I have a doctor who wants to lower my resting pulse with beta blockers. I don’t like the side effects and trust my body to regulate my pulse. Is a high resting pulse an independent health risk, and does lowering it actually improve health?
All I can really find is a study out of the Netherlands and even that says high resting pulse is more a symptom of underlying disease than a risk factor.
Generally speaking, you’re more likely to get good health advice from an actual doctor than from random strangers on the internet.
IMHO, we often can’t trust our bodies to regulate themselves. For example, my body insists on growing bone spurs in my spine and knee. They hurt, and as far as I can tell don’t help me a bit.
It also insists on overreacting to some environmental substance and giving me sinus headaches, thus the need to take medicine every day.
Rapid resting heart rate seems to be a risk marker/predictor for other problems like hypertension and even diabetes. As implied in this very nice little abstract, it remains to be shown that reducing heart rate with the use of medications will, in turn, reduce the risk of developing those things.
Medical advice is best suited to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
There is also the fact that things like smoking, having out of control stress and being sedentary will all result in a higher resting pulse. Although the studies I’ve looked at seem like they tried to factor out the sedentary part, I don’t know about the other two.
I do not know of any actual research so take this as a WAG but the idea that lowering a resting pulse with medication would be of some benefit seems very unlikely to be true to me. A low resting pulse that is the result of regular aerobic exercise (and thus a large stroke volume) is associated with good health outcomes but the low pulse is a marker of the good things that have occurred, not the good thing itself.
Different than using meds to lower BP for example, or certain cholesterol factions … for those we have reason to believe that the items are more than markers but are major factors in the pathophysiology of disease states and that reducing them per se will decrease future morbidity and mortality. Pulse rate? I don’t think so.
OP, two questions: 1) what are the side effects of the Beta blockers that you’re complaining about?
Okay, three:
I’ve never been very clear on that part. Everybody in my family has high resting rates, but low to very low to “OMG how are you standing” BP; doctors tend to treat it as a case of the two parameters compensating each other. “High BP + high rate” being a worse problem than “high BP” by itself, I can see, but… it’s one of those things where I wonder how much is it a case of comorbidity, how much one of cause and effect and how much does it happen to be completely unrelated. Then again, the difficulty in isolating variables is probably the biggest challenge of medical statistics: people aren’t machines, you can’t turn a knob to raise or lower parameters.
I’m not the OP, but I do take beta blockers. I had a minor heart attack 14 years ago and they can’t ‘fix’ the clogged cardiac artery short of open heart surgery. So I’m on BBs to keep my max heart rate down. FYI: I do a lot of aerobic exercise such as riding my bicycle 4,000+ miles a year plus 2 or 3 half marathons. I wear a heart rate monitor while exercise and I’m pretty in tune with my heart rate.
1a. One bad side effect is cooling your body in hot weather. Think of the heart as the water pump on your car. The water pump is now turning slower, but the car is still producing the same amount of heat. I have my doctor’s permission to skip a dosage if I’m going to be riding my bicycle in 95 degree F heat.
For the OP, have you and your doctor considered things like losing weight (assuming that you have some to lose) and large amount of aerobic exercise to bring down your heart rate? Aerobic exercise, even vigorous walking 30 minutes a day) can drop the resting heart rate. Much better to do it naturally than ingest medicines.
Of course you may have a heart wiring issue that requires medicine to correct. If your resting heart rate is over 100 BPM, then something is really, really wrong.
I forgot another side effect: BBs are used to treat anxiety disorders. What if you don’t have an anxiety disorder? Well it still ‘treats’ the symptoms. I know that I lost some of my ‘edge’ at work when I went on BBs. I started to not give a damn about things that I really should have been worried about. I started letting important issues slide by. Not good. Again the lower dosage helped some.