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Pots / Dysautonomia And Hormone Levels


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I would just like to toss in some info re 'fight or flight'.  Joseph LeDoux of NYU (a neuroscientist studying fear/anxiety/defense mechanisms) offers some fascinating insights into the autonomic 'fear/defense' mechanism.  The key point I find interesting, is that this autonomic response is related to but not identical to the 'emotional' sense of anxiety.  In other words, you can have a 'fear' or 'fight or flight' purely physical autonomic response without feeling at all stressed or fearful emotionally.  Given how powerful the autonomic response system is in altering body functions (hemodynamics, heart rate, fluid balance, etc), this is quite interesting.  If you look at the issues of stress cardiomyopathy (also called takotsubo cardiomyopathy), paroxysmal hypertension (Page's Syndrome, pseudopheochromocytoma) and who knows what else - doctors seem to attribute the cause as probably being 'emotional' - yet a significant percentage of patients cannot identify any emotional triggers - probably because they DON'T feel any emotional trigger.   This is not to suggest a person needs talk therapy if this is the case - LeDoux, if I am correct, states the part of the brain that interacts with the amygdala during the autonomic response does not have the wiring to be influenced by the 'conscious' parts of the brain.

An interesting item - stress cardiomyopathy - happens almost exlusively in menopausal women.   

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