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Skyrocketing BP and HR after eating

JaimeS

Senior Member
Messages
3,408
Location
Silicon Valley, CA
Uh oh.

Ate some delicious food, including grapes (high sugar, I know, but so lovely... and I haven't had issues with sugar for awhile.)

Then: heart thumping in my chest, back-of-neck-ache tightening, whole body thrumming. I have an app on my phone that measures heart rate, BP, oxygen saturation -- very useful, and readings have been accurate so far in that they are consistent when I feel 'my normal' and get worse when I feel crappy.

All these measures are recumbent, propped half-up in bed, not standing much less moving around!

BP was 149/96 (Typically mine is low-normal, say 110/75).
HR was 111-bpm (Typically mine is normal unless I'm over-exerting. Even when I am, it's in the 90s.)
Oxygen saturation had fallen to 94% (Normally 98%, and yes, little differences like this cause symptom shifts in me).

I'm very uncomfortable. I can feel my body releasing relaxing chemicals and an attendant decrease in BP and HR; but then it kicks up a bit again before lowering yet further:

BP and HR changes:

upload_2017-8-8_22-33-40.png

....basically.

This sucks, I still had work to do tonight. Anyone know what gives? The internet is being very dark, saying this is a sign of serious cardiac issues, a severe spike in blood sugar, or a new food allergy.

Joy.
 

bspg

Plant Queen
Messages
547
Location
USA
My first thought is allergy but I'm fairly new to this. Can you take an antihistamine?
 

Helen

Senior Member
Messages
2,243
Sorry to hear about that hard punishment for eating some delicious food. A doctor once told me to check out for increased pulse after eating new food as that probably was a sign of a food sensitivity. Not much of help, but maybe you can keep an eye on similar food later and find out. The app you have sounds really helpful. Would you like to share some data about it?
 
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echobravo

Keep searching, the answer is out there
Messages
137
Location
Norway
Did you check if it could be some kind of disorder related to the autonomic nervous system, i.e. dysautonomia? Eating will divert blood to intestines so maybe to maintain blood supply to the rest of your body your heart needs to work harder? Any orthostatic intolerance or POTS related symptoms?
 

gregh286

Senior Member
Messages
976
Location
Londonderry, Northern Ireland.
i used to get this after eating carbs every now and then. I had to lie down, thought heart would explode.
I thought about food allergy and stuff but eventually come to conclusion it felt more like a huge adrenaline surge.
with vasoconstriction you experience (>blood pressure than normal),
so, i put it down to another mismanagement of sugar/insulin by our dysfunctional HPA system.
last time happened was early this year.
 

JaimeS

Senior Member
Messages
3,408
Location
Silicon Valley, CA
Did you check if it could be some kind of disorder related to the autonomic nervous system, i.e. dysautonomia? Eating will divert blood to intestines so maybe to maintain blood supply to the rest of your body your heart needs to work harder? Any orthostatic intolerance or POTS related symptoms?

It's my #1 candidate right now. I've had positive TTT, but this was in the extreme of what I've experienced before.

By the by, the Anemone relaxed my muscles, which is its job, but did not lower my HR. :rolleyes:

Cinnamon + lots of ice water + digestive enzymes = much reduced symptoms, though my heart is still thumping rather insistently.

Do you have any issues with salicylates? Grapes are sky-high in sals, which can cause that 'back and neck tightening', among other things.

Not that I'm aware of...

i used to get this after eating carbs every now and then.

Me too, or too much sugar. Hasn't happened in ages, and I think this is the worst it's ever been. Just not sure why. Maybe too swift a change in blood sugar.

What sort of time delay after eating? Any associated GI symptoms?

Pretty swiftly, and not really. GI seems fine, but that doesn't tell me much: often I get CNS neuro symptoms instead of GI when things are not going well in the GI. However, there were no overtly CNS symptoms this time, more ANS.

Grapes are often treated with sulfite. I can get asthma sometimes from sulfite and have reacted quite badly to it in the past. Maybe you have an allergy to sulfite?

I'll look into it!

Thanks to everyone who replied.
 

Forbin

Senior Member
Messages
966
I know this feeling well. Early in the illness, I noticed an inexplicably rapid reaction to eating things with sugar, even if it was just freshly baked bread. I would get a pounding heart and tachycardia. Three (count 'em) three glucose tolerance tests found nothing, even though I had a pounding heart during each of them (but, hey, my tests were normal, so nooo problem. :rolleyes:)

About a year later, first thing in the morning, I drank a can of Cherry Coke on an empty stomach (not my usual routine:)). Within about 15 minutes, I was knocked flat on my back with a pounding heart, tachycardia, profuse sweating, deep flushing of my face, chest and arms; polyuria, lung congestion and generally felt like I was going to die. It lasted about 45 minutes.

Over time I was able to single out the sweetener "high fructose corn syrup" as the culprit. By that point I could tell you blindfolded which foods had HFCS.

HFCS was being added to all sorts of foods in the 1980's, starting with soft drinks (just around the time I became ill).

I don't know the connection to ME/CFS except that it seems like it might be an autonomic malfunction where adrenaline is mistakenly being released for some reason. Either that or "bad" microbes in the gut are chowing down on sugar or, in my case, they really have a taste for HFCS.
 
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Richard7

Senior Member
Messages
772
Location
Australia
@JaimeS I don't have the best handle on this but have the same symptoms quite often.

I think it is a kind of threshold effect like or related to PEM.

I have not kept careful reccords but wear a heart rate monitor and find that when I eat a small meal - say and apple or coffee with coconut cream - I have a small increase in my heart rate maybe 10bpm that will not last long maybe 30 minutes or so. If I eat a normal meal it is something like 30bpm that lasts about 2 hours. But there are occasions where I find that it just goes crazy and I am at 100 bpm sitting say for five hours after what seems to me to be a normal meal. On the worst days I will be at 90bpm horizontal late at night and cannot get it down till sometime during sleep.

I do detect a slight association with higher carbs or available carbs, but really on the things that researchers have tracked like insulin and glucose we know that predicting a response can be difficult and very personal.

I also detect a strong relationship to my overall health. It is worst on bad PEM/PoTS days.

I suspect that it might just be PEM, and I have got to the point where just eating a meal can put me there, but allergies or other sources on inflammation could be relevant as they increase vasodilation which will make PoTS worse.

I find that when things are bad the best thing is just to get horizontal or as close as you can in bed or a reclining chair.

For palpitations I find potassium and salt usually work. Unless I have forgotten to take magnesium - which feels different. When they do not work I find that b complex seems to work - I think b6 b9 and b12 are the relevant bs and used to be pretty good a differentiating the sensations but sometimes none of them worked but the b complex did - so I just take the b complex.
 

JaimeS

Senior Member
Messages
3,408
Location
Silicon Valley, CA
@Richard7 -- yes, I think you hit the nail on the head. I was just telling @slysaint that I think it really was just the meal.

I had been working very hard to get that literature summary in last evening. Good on me, I ate a healthy lunch: tuna and spicy greens with lots of veggies, which is one of the best things I can do for myself -- but I ate it slowly, a bite here, a bite there, because I was very focused on work. I ate the whole thing, but at no point was my stomach "full".

Then I come home and I'm pretty darned hungry and know I need to keep working, so I order something calorie-heavy that I know is generally good for me to eat: clay rice bowl with salmon and roe. Mmm, delicious. I look down and I've eaten 3/4 and could probably keep going. Normally this is at least two meals for me. Eek! Well, I don't feel over-full but this is a lot of food I've just consumed! I put the rest away, have some grapes to clear the palate and...

Cue the symptoms.

I think I just consumed way more carbs than my body can actually handle at a go. For those of you who have been with me on this whole crazy journey, there was a time (not so long ago!) I couldn't do carbs or sugars at all. I don't handle them super-well. When I think of how many grams of sugar / carbs I probably consumed in one sitting, I feel very foolish. We're talking maybe 50-g of pure sugar plus all those carbs yesterday. :cautious::aghhh:

It was only later on that I actually did the addition and cringed. :bang-head::bang-head::bang-head:

Thanks for the advice, everybody. Good to know PR is there in one's time of need. :redface:
 

JaimeS

Senior Member
Messages
3,408
Location
Silicon Valley, CA
@JaimeS are you feeling better now?

Yes. Much!

The water and cinnamon helped a lot (so probably yes, blood sugar high plus lots of diversion of blood to gut = heart working very, very hard). I think I drank maybe five glasses of water over the next few hours. It calmed considerably after the first two glasses of water and the mouthful of cinnamon, and was effectively gone in four or five hours. This morning I feel just fine, though I'm relaxing in preparation for tomorrow's conference at Stanford.

Re: panic attack -- panic attacks are often after a long, stressful day when you finally decide it's time to relax. Then, all the leftover adrenaline gets dumped into the system, at least in my experience, when you lie down at night and prepare to sleep. I had two of those in graduate school and still remember how they feel. This = not the same.
  • Rather than on relaxation (or an attempt to relax) I was upright and chatting when I experienced symptoms
  • Symptoms were gradual and increasing rather than totally sudden
  • The character of the symptoms didn't feel the same -- no heart palps, just heart 'working' very hard
I didn't want to be super-dismissive of that response, it was a good guess. :) I thought I should explain why I was just "nope" so quickly!
 

Jenny TipsforME

Senior Member
Messages
1,184
Location
Bristol
I'm noticing that stress seems to put my ability to manage blood sugar out of kilter for a while (though I'm out of test strips to objectively measure this).

By stress I mean the amount I have to do exceeding my energy envelope to do it in, not an emotional response to a bad day.

Once my blood sugar isn't well controlled I can't sleep through the night and get what I call "illogical hunger" a lot more. It can create a bit of a downhill spiral.

Though what you're describing here sounds more like my pre beta blocker experience of POTS. I could go up to 120bpm eating.