Heart Rate Variability and ME/CFS

As i mentioned in some posts in PR, my irregular heartbeats used to be so intense that i went to a cardiologist. He told me to wear a holter device for 24 hours. After analyzing the data they told me how many incidents of irregular heartbeat i had but they said that these were "extra heartbeats therefore not dangerous".

After doing specific interventions they faded away within a month.

 

Interesting stuff. I have been shopping the past couple weeks for a HR monitor to do HRV tracking! I'm going to get the Polar H10. Have you tracked your HRV overnight while sleeping?

To try and increase parasympathetic tone, have you tried or heard of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation? There are threads on PR and Healthrisin describing how to do it and techniques.

Yes, a Polish colleague of Morten is looking at cryotherapy to increase parasympathetic tone.

 

I do understand your way of thinking and it makes sense. Unfortunately i cannot stop magnesium as i believe that my body has taken too much these past 15 days. I need to make sure that whatever i went through will not happen for some time (say a month). But i will try it.

Here is how my results look at the moment :




observe below how the line chart shows the stabilisation of HRV to normal levels

 

I've just started using HRV again after seeing this thread. It does capture my crashes quite well, and even when I'm feeling better the LF and HF numbers are still off.

 

I wanted to provide a short update on my HRV monitoring.


Things have been going exceptionally well. I do not have any occurences of irregular heartbeat and the HRV is steady over 50. I also confirm for once again that specific symptoms of ME/CFS correlate with a low HRV (speaking for myself).

 

NIH-funded HRV Study announced for ME/CFS at Stony Brook University
https://twitter.com/user/status/1155508420457443328

 

Into month 3 of HRV tracking. Uninterpretable so far, still.

The yellow bars are my actual HRV scores, and the thick blue line is a 15-day moving average of those values. The thicker purple line is a 15-day moving average of my resting heart rate (RHR) as calculated by Fitbit. I think Fitbit must apply some smoothing to their RHR calculation, as the EliteHRV RHR calculation is much noisier.



One thing that I do find quite interesting is that my HRV has been increasing steadily since I began tracking it, and it's correlated with a period of having a relatively consistent RHR. Both of those measurements also correlate with a crash that started in June.

The up-and-down waves in RHR at the beginning of the year are normal, and I was able to get out of the house a few times a week then, as I was feeling much better. Seems that a higher HRV, not just a lower HRV, could also be a helpful indicator of things not being quite right, especially taken alongside RHR discrepancies.

https://hrvcourse.com/the-8-biggest-mistakes-made-when-measuring-hrv/

Sounds familiar, right?

More data needed before I can say whether any of this is telling me anything useful, but thought I'd post some preliminary findings all the same.

 

I'm curious about how you submerge your head in ice water.

 

Ah yes, my "impeccable" english in action. I meant just the face, not the entire head ;-)

 

Here is an update regarding my HRV readings. I am very happy to say that there is sustained normalisation of the HRV readings. However, the most important aspect i believe is the fact that my irregular heartbeats are virtually gone (second snapshot = 0 artifacts detected and corrected) :

 

What treatment approach did you use? Submerging face in ice water, breathing, humming, gargling? How long did you persist at this? Did you notic any other changes besides your irregular hearbeats?

 

I do not believe that sharing my treatment is the right thing to do since it may well be the case that something i am taking is beneficial to me but not to someone else. What i wanted to highlight through these posts is that it appears that my symptoms correlate with low HRV readings (and also that irregular heartbeats are part of my symptoms)

I've been taking these readings on and off to be honest, as soon as i found that low HRV correlate with my symptoms