Heart Rate Variability and ME/CFS

rvallee said:
I also have a irregular heartbeat. Or anyway I'm not sure if it's the right term but I regularly skip beats. Beat-beat-skiiip-beatbeat-beat-beat etc.

I have no idea how to check for that. My heart has been checked several times and it's apparently fine but I've had those skips for a long time and either it's normal or it wasn't noticeable with the tests I did.

I used a Fitbit for a while and it doesn't seem to be part of the data. I guess you need a specific device for that?
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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.
 
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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.

mariovitali said:
EDIT : I believe that Dr Morten is being researching the response of ME/CFS patients to cold.
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Yes, a Polish colleague of Morten is looking at cryotherapy to increase parasympathetic tone.
 
wigglethemouse said:
There are soooooo many variables it is often hard to see what has been the cause of a downturn and what has a an effect on an upturn. I hope you have found something for you.

May I suggest that if you think Mg is having the positive effect that you stop it for a few days and see if HRV gets lower. If it does go lower restart Mg and see if HRV increases. I know this is hard if you think something is working, but remember if it's not the Mg causing the improvement you may be adding something your body doesn't need.

Many of us think we have found the next great thing, only to discover it no longer works, or it wasn't the thing that caused the improvement after all.

Do you also wear a HR watch that tracks daily resting HR? I was intrigued by @diwa post that shows resting HR inversely correlates with HRV with HRV lagging resting HR slightly (did I get that right?).
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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 :

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


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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).

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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.

Screenshot 2019-08-24 at 20.03.59.png

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/

Just as a low HRV reading is not always bad, a high HRV reading is not always good. If a single HRV measurement is abnormally high compared to an individual’s baseline or norm, then it can mean something is off. Here are a few examples of when a high reading does not always indicate better health and resiliency.

  • For certain mild illnesses or sicknesses, an elevated immune system can increase Heart Rate Variability. This is favorable for recovery from the illness but should not be seen as an increase in health.
  • If an individual is in a state of hyper recovery, their HRV can be abnormally high. When the body accumulates too much stress to the point where it can no longer effectively handle the stress and resources are depleted, the body might force itself into a hyper-recovery mode as a last resort to protect itself. This state is not ideal for long-term health or performance.
  • Continuous low grade stressors can cause HRV to be higher in the short term because the body is constantly trying to recover from them. If your HRV is high but you frequently feel fatigued or drained, then you might be exposed to chronic low grade stress that is constantly stealing energy and resources from your body. This is not ideal and over the long-term, if these accumulated low grade stressors are not dealt with, they can eventually cause HRV and health to decrease.
A high reading does not always indicate better health and resiliency.
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Sounds familiar, right? :dead:

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.
 
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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) :


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mariovitali said:
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) :
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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?
 
junkcrap50 said:
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?
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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
 
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