# Palpitations



## Sina (Oct 27, 2010)

Let's talk about palpitations. 

*Please answer the following:-*

1)How long have you had them?

2) If you know what kind, do elaborate. 

3) How long does each episode last? If applicable, what do you do to try and lower your heart rate- deep breathing, Valsalva Maneuver? 

4) What causes your palps? 


I had a nasty episode yesterday at a party. I was enjoying myself, and I had a ton of fun. I didn't consume any alcohol/stimulants that could've caused them. I was also relaxed and not 'anxious' in the least. They started suddenly, and for the first time ever, lasted nearly 20 minutes. I've had them on and off for years, nothing serious. More recently, I had them because of thyroid disease. It resolved after my meds were adjusted. This is pretty common in people with Hashmimoto's etc. But, no episode lasted that long. 

Yesterday, I just excused myself and went to a more isolated place, where I tried the Valsalva Maneuver. Then, I sat down and waited for the palps to pass. Thankfully, they resolved soon after. Later at night, I had to climb several flights of stairs to my flat because the lift wasn't working. And, I was a bit nervous to be honest lol. I was worried the palps would return. It's usually indicated that palps lasting over 20 minutes warrant an ER visit, though mine resolved in barely under 20 minutes. And, I didn't feel like hitting the hospital because the V.M resolved mine. Fortunately, climbing the several flights of stairs I mentioned didn't do anything besides causing the regular increased heart rate from more intense physical activity. In less than 3 minutes *phew*, it had normalized. 

I am still concerned about the nearly 20 minute long episode. My highest heart rate during was about 125, which isn't the end of the world per se. But, it's the duration of the episode that irks me. Anyone have similar problems? I will be bringing it up to my GP next time.


----------



## Death Persuades (Feb 17, 2012)

I'd be terrified  I have them sometimes but it's just a few seconds of very quick beating followed by a very short, painful pause. I think it's common, though.


----------



## milti (Feb 8, 2012)

It's very common and usually nothing to worry about.

Anaemia causes palpitation-like things, which can cause panic, worsening them. I also notice an in increase in them when I'm dehydrated, and really annoying ones when I've eaten more than I know I should. Lol.

Those, apart from the obvious causes, are all I can think of. In my case, they indicate slight atrial fibrillation but nothing serious. I take a baby aspirin everyday and they seem to have lessened.


----------



## Sina (Oct 27, 2010)

@_milti_

Yeah, I've had them for a long time on and off. I get them from dehydration, gluttony rofl, stress and at times random stuff like sleeping on the left, and they resolve as soon as I change positions. These are the harmless ones. My tests have come back normal thus far. I had an ECG done during an episode, and it was just regular sinus tachy. The stress test came back fine a while ago. But, I might need an event monitor. My palps can be widely spaced and completely go away for weeks on end. 

I am aware it's quite common and usually harmless. I had some bad ones a while back (RHR of 130-140), and it turned out to be thyroid related as I was expecting. It returned to normal within days of medicinal adjustment. I had swung hyperthyroid. That crap sucks lol. 

I don't have anemia, thankfully lol. Like I said, yesterday's episode was atypical because it lasted nearly 20 fuckin minutes. And, I know that it's too long. Generally, any episode of palps that doesn't resolve within 20 minutes should get checked out ASAP. They shouldn't last more than a few seconds to a few minutes. Mine was barely under the 20 minute mark, so I am concerned. 

Thank goodness for the Valsalva Maneuver. That was a real party saver, because I was about to get up and leave lol.


----------



## telepariah (Jun 20, 2011)

In 2000 I had an extended episode of SVT. I had a resting heart rate over 150 for several weeks. I went to see a cardiologist due to my rapid heart rate and after his technician had taken my history and an ECG he came running into the room holding the ECG saying, "I had to see you right away because I can not reconcile this ECG with your history. It appears you've had a heart attack!" I said I had heard of 'silent' heart attacks but really didn't think I had experienced one because I am very active and thought I would have noticed something else. He showed me the ECG with the SVT signature. He asked me if I had ever had a traumatic injury to my chest and I responded in the affirmative. 

In 1986 while extreme skiing I had taken a 1000 foot fall off a glacier and over a cliff. I was airborne for over 100 feet and landed on a steep snow slope on my left scapula, shattering it into 8 pieces, blowing out my clavicle also into 8 pieces, and breaking all the ribs on my left side. He took an echo cardiogram and we could clearly see the centimeter sized dent in the wall of my heart muscle that had been caused by one of my ribs lacerating it during that fall. 

He said that he had no explanation for how I survived this injury but that it was not the cause of my SVT. We talked about environmental factors that could be at play and we made a plan to eliminate one thing at a time from my lifestyle to see if we could determine a cause. The first was caffeine. I quit drinking coffee and taking all forms of caffeine. There was no change after a week. Next he asked me if I was taking any vitamins or supplements. At the time I was taking a multivitamin and zinc as it was cold season. I had never done the zinc before so I eliminated that and changed to a children's multivitamin that did not contain any zinc. The tachycardia resolved in less than three days, returning to my normal resting heart rate in the 40s. So it was determined that I have a rare sensitivity to zinc that causes my rapid heart rate.

He had me take a nuclear stress test during which I ran on his treadmill for 30 minutes and got my heart rate up to 209. I was 44 years old at the time and according to conventional wisdom should have dropped dead from that. But my blood pressure never got higher than 130/90 and while tired, I recovered quickly. Again, the cardiologist was stymied by this result. He said he didn't have any equipment that could stress my heart and that I had the heart health of a 30 year old trained athlete. He told me to come back in a year for another nuclear stress test and I repeated the same performance. At that time he just said I had an abnormal physiology that he could not explain but that he did not believe I was in any danger. He did advise me to quit my job, which was very stressful. I didn't follow that advice and went on with my life. My ECG still showed SVTs and the palpitations would still return from time to time but I was able to control them using the VM. 

Fast forward to 2011 and I was having terrible head and neck pain and had been diagnosed with trigeminal and occipital neuralgias stemming from that fall in 1986 and a number of other head and neck injuries suffered in my life. These neuralgias started about a year after the second stress test. I had become unable to work due to the severe pain in my head and had to see him again because the insurance company wanted to evaluate me for permanent disability. I had also had another episode of tachycardia at a concert that lasted about 5 minutes and a scarier day backcountry skiing where it lasted a lot longer and caused me to slow my climbing pace down to where everybody on the trail passed me like I was standing still. I did another abnormal performance on the stress test, though my maximum heart rate had dropped a little to 190 at age 55. Still unexplained other than to say I am a statistical outlier. But the interesting thing was the SVT no longer showed on the ECG and an echo cardiogram showed no evidence of the scar on my heart. Again, he said my heart was healthy but also again told me I really should quit my job because one way or another the stress was going to kill me. I was forced to retire a few months later because the pain was too much to allow me to perform. I was really sick and scared, but as soon as I did quit that job, I started to get better. I work a much less stressful job now, though I just accepted a promotion to the management team. We'll see where that takes me. But for now I am feeling a whole lot better than I did for 20 years in that other career. My cranio-sacral therapist has all but cured the neuralgias and I see her on a regular basis for maintenance on the neurological symptoms that are probably not related to the tachycardia.

Having a resting heart rate of over 150 is terrifying and I am hopeful it does not happen again.


----------



## milti (Feb 8, 2012)

@telepariah - My blood pressure and heart rate are always very low, just the opposite of yours. The low blood pressure isn't worrying, but sometimes I wonder - having a heart rate that doesn't go above 60 bpm usually IS a bit unusual.


----------



## Biracial (Sep 8, 2010)

I have sinus bradycardia. I would (over) compensate with large amounts of espresso and I mean a LOT. I am a coffee junkie. And I do mean junkie. I had palpitations and they scared me. So, I kicked the caffeine habit finally. My palpitations are now few and far between. One less thing I have to worry about. For now.


----------



## telepariah (Jun 20, 2011)

@milti, ah... I think I may have been a little misleading or incomplete in my admittedly lengthy description. :wink:

My resting heart rate is 42. But it can go abnormally high during exercise. My blood pressure is also low. It ranges from 96/60 to 110/74 at rest. The highest it ever gets during exercise is that 130/90. I do know some people who have a very low maximum heart rate. I suppose there are ranges around all these measurements and you may be an outlier at the low end of max heart rate while I am definitely your opposite on that particular measurement.


----------



## Hurricane Matthew (Nov 9, 2012)

I get heart palpitations every few months in small amounts ever since I came down with mononucleosis. I never had health problems before that and a part of me wants to say it triggered something that made this happen. Most of the time, it's very mild and last only a few minutes, but they really catch my attention and make me pause whatever I'm doing. Sometimes they last longer and just won't go away, coming back multiple times throughout the day. Twice I passed out during them ((one of those times I hit my head and got a concussion)). I went to the doctor over it one of those times and the doctor said it was because I had slightly low blood pressure, which I accepted at the time even though my BP is only very slightly below normal. One time after that, they woke me up while I was sleeping and it felt so horrible that I thought I was dying because my heart felt weird and my chest was aching, and it was lasting for many hours. My mom drove me to the emergency room where I got a thorough exam and everything, but nothing abnormal was found to be wrong and everything seemed fine. The low BP explanation seemed okay for the short ones, but it seems hard to believe it could cause the big one...? It was on an otherwise-normal day... and I don't do drugs, smoke, drink alcohol or caffeine... so I was disappointed it had no explanations.

I still get them fairly regularly... but just mild cases. I don't know what causes them... they seem random to me. They might happen while I'm sitting doing nothing, or in the middle of physical activity. It doesn't seem to be very consistent about when it happens or causes for it :/ I hate them since they scare me >.<


----------



## milti (Feb 8, 2012)

@_Matthew Nisshoku_ Something I've realised is that you can't take what doctors say at face value. IME some doctors, without checking my history, have been very short with me and told me basically to stop wasting their time, or they've run me through a series of useless tests because they think I'm so worried about my health that they might as well make money off it. I mean, this is how they put off diagnosing my TB for months and months, while I KNEW something was wrong! 

However, I don't take any heart-related symptoms seriously. I usually just dismiss palpitations or a painful chest as a side effect of over-eating or caffeine or whatever. Years of my mother's unnecessary panic over my (real or imagined) symptoms have taught me to chill out about it. If my mum had her way, we'd be living next door to an emergency ward.


----------



## Promethea (Aug 24, 2009)

I have a benign arrhythmia, called "premature ventricular contraction" where basically, in my chest, I will feel one, or even perhaps a series of ~_flutter-thump_~ or what feels like an _electric pinch_ moving through my heart and chest or arm muscles. Once in a while its accompanied with light-headedness, but typically its just a weird sensation. It used to be quite unnerving until I had an ekg, stress test, and holter monitor done, to find some certainty in it being benign. Now I just shrug it off when I feel it.

Alcohol and caffeine can play a role in aggravating mine, but not because they are directly stimulating my heart per se; but because they stimulate my vagus nerve. Even acid reflux or eating a heavy meal can set it off - so I put it all together and realized that digestive upset -> vagus nerve stimulation -> arrhythmia starts back up. So, for mine personally, I blame gerd (the disease that causes bad acid reflux.) I have seen a lot in medical literature, back when I was trying to figure out what was wrong, and researching it, to confirm that it can in fact be a cause.. as I'd suspected just from monitoring my own body. 

It was a stressful experience.


----------



## sme14 (Apr 29, 2013)

I agree about the alcohol/caffeine triggers. Have you ever been prescribed propranolol? It's a beta-blocker which inhibits the binding of epinephrine/norepinephrine which cause the racing heart/sweaty hands/chest pounding. It has really helped me, taken as needed.


----------



## Sina (Oct 27, 2010)

Promethea said:


> I have a benign arrhythmia, called "premature ventricular contraction" where basically, in my chest, I will feel one, or even perhaps a series of ~_flutter-thump_~ or what feels like an _electric pinch_ moving through my heart and chest or arm muscles. Once in a while its accompanied with light-headedness, but typically its just a weird sensation. It used to be quite unnerving until I had an ekg, stress test, and holter monitor done, to find some certainty in it being benign. Now I just shrug it off when I feel it.
> 
> Alcohol and caffeine can play a role in aggravating mine, but not because they are directly stimulating my heart per se; but because they stimulate my vagus nerve. Even acid reflux or eating a heavy meal can set it off - so I put it all together and realized that digestive upset -> vagus nerve stimulation -> arrhythmia starts back up. So, for mine personally, I blame gerd (the disease that causes bad acid reflux.) I have seen a lot in medical literature, back when I was trying to figure out what was wrong, and researching it, to confirm that it can in fact be a cause.. as I'd suspected just from monitoring my own body.
> 
> It was a stressful experience.


Fuck, I experienced this today. I remembered your post on my thread, instantly. I am familiar with PVCs. I have had benign ectopic heartbeats, so just a few skipped beats here and there.

These ones were a bit disconcerting. That "electrical pinch" session is the perfect description, like a couple of fluttery thumps followed by a strong beat that nearly shook me lol. It was a series-- flutter *thump*flutter* strong beat*electrical pinch sensation. It happened twice 2.5 hours or so. 

I am going to need another set of tests done, I think. My ECG, echo, stress test and holter monitoring didn't yield anything abnormal. But, I am going to get a repeat. I also need an event monitor this time, because Palps and this new annoying fuckin thing come and go at random times. My palps have been thyroid related, in the past. But, I hate this crap. It's disconcerting as fuck.

I have really bad nasal congestion, and every time I blew my nose, I'd feel this pressure in my chest (which is normal). That may also have triggered it, oddly enough. I avoid coffee and tea, and heavy meals causing palps can actually be blood sugar related as well. It's been a while since I've had palps from a heavy meal. 

But yeah, thanks for the post. Do you mind describing your skipped beats sensation and PVCs in a bit more detail? How frequent is it?


----------



## LadyO.W.BernieBro (Sep 4, 2010)

1)How long have you had them?

Had low blood pressure and orthostatic dizziness 'eipisodes'since childhood but only noticed palpitations that felt scary in late teens.

2) If you know what kind, do elaborate. 

No, just medical tachycardia but no diagnosed health issue.

3) How long does each episode last? If applicable, what do you do to try and lower your heart rate- deep breathing, Valsalva Maneuver? 

Once, probably 16 hours.Just wouldn't stop. l try holding my breath sometimes, l didn't know about any maneuvers.

4) What causes your palps? 
l've had this issue for years, l'm just finding out that my blood pressure is ''naturally'' low which may be associated with it.


lt's gotten very scary in the past, l once visited the ER and felt extremely foolish when they told me l was having a panic attack.

Didn't really have anxiety symptoms, just thought l was dying O_O

Caffeine intake is unpredictable, l can drink it every day, not react to 4-5 cups and then suddenly have a major reaction to 1 cup that nearly makes me physically ill.

l'm thinking it's worsened a bit, or at least 'feels' like it's more noticeable when my bloodsugar is off, so a stable diet and avoiding adrenal fatigue helps.


----------



## Promethea (Aug 24, 2009)

Cosmic Orgasm said:


> Fuck, I experienced this today. I remembered your post on my thread, instantly. I am familiar with PVCs. I have had benign ectopic heartbeats, so just a few skipped beats here and there.
> 
> These ones were a bit disconcerting. That "electrical pinch" session is the perfect description, like a couple of fluttery thumps followed by a strong beat that nearly shook me lol. It was a series-- flutter *thump*flutter* strong beat*electrical pinch sensation. It happened twice 2.5 hours or so.
> 
> ...


I haven't had any for a long time but there were times I would have them literally all day, like I would only have a few minutes without them. A thump in the chest was the most frequent, a few in a row I think are the "flutter-thump" feeling. There were times I would get just a few a month, but other times much more. I think it was stress and severe acid reflux. I had my esophagus stretched and that may have helped. The inside was so scarred it had narrowed. But yeah, it can be connected to digestive stuff.


----------



## Zombie Devil Duckie (Apr 11, 2012)

> l once visited the ER and felt extremely foolish when they told me l was having a panic attack.


I had a call one time for a woman who was dead in a public bathroom stall. She was fully clothed and had a heart attack. The ME's best guess, based on her experience, was that the woman didn't want to inconvenience anyone so she went into the stall to be alone, and then died there. She also told me that she had experience with women who choked to death in restaurant bathrooms because they were too afraid to ask for someone to do the heimlich maneuver.

Don't ever feel too embarrassed when you don't feel good. Let someone know. Hospitals would rather see you leave on your feet than in a body bag.

OP, I've experienced the fluttering you mentioned. It was an odd feeling 


-ZDD


----------



## LadyO.W.BernieBro (Sep 4, 2010)

Zombie Devil Duckie said:


> I had a call one time for a woman who was dead in a public bathroom stall. She was fully clothed and had a heart attack. The ME's best guess, based on her experience, was that the woman didn't want to inconvenience anyone so she went into the stall to be alone, and then died there. She also told me that she had experience with women who choked to death in restaurant bathrooms because they were too afraid to ask for someone to do the heimlich maneuver.
> 
> Don't ever feel too embarrassed when you don't feel good. Let someone know. Hospitals would rather see you leave on your feet than in a body bag.
> 
> ...


Well, l was probably 19 then.

l do take those warnings seriously, though. 

lt's been kind of a circular issue since then, l was given the diagnosis of GAD later, but part of that was the psychiatrist asking me id l'd ever had panic attacks, which l responded yes to but tried to communicate that l'm still not sure if that was really a panic attack or more of a medical issue.

So, if l did have an actual medical issue, they may blame GAD, and l might not know if l ever have a heart issue but they did run extensive tests then.

l only partially identify with the overall anxiety disorder criteria.


----------



## Children Of The Bad Revolution (Oct 8, 2013)

I've had panic attacks and palpitations linked to anxiety. I don't get them as often now but I have learnt how to breathe myself 'out' of them when they do happen.


----------

