Coughing & Palps When Hr Goes Down Suddenly?

[katyroq]

Anyone else have coughing fits when lying down or after stopping exercising? I get palpitations and coughing when my HR drops by a lot (maybe 30-50 bpm). Sometimes sitting down after walking, usually lying down in bed. When I used to run I would always cough when I finished a run and sat down. I am interested to know if its POTS or just normal me

[angelloz]

Hello,

I don't really have an answer for you but I do notice I feel really crummy a few minutes after sitting if I have been up and moving for awhile. Also, getting up after being still and sitting makes me feel bad. It seems my body does not respond well to change. No coughing that I have noticed.

[Katybug]

I do sometimes have this symptom. I had it more when I first became ill than I do now. I'm not sure what causes it or how to reduce it. So, I am probably not being that helpful other than to give more support and validity to what you are noticing.

[aaron.parks]

Have you ever tried measuring your blood pressure while this is happening? Those are times when your BP would generally be quite high: Sitting or lying after walking/exercise can cause a large spike in BP even in normal people, and depending on your flavor of dysautonomia the spikes could be abnormally large. The heart rate should go down reflexively when BP is high, so that might make sense based on your description.

Even if you normally have low orthostatic BP, you may still have sharp spikes in these cases. If your diastolic BP (the lower number) is much over 100 or the systolic BP is over 180 for more than a minute or two when sitting after exercising, you probably would want to talk to your doctor (it's normal for exercise to raise your systolic a lot, and your diastolic a little, but it should return to normal within minutes). Abnormally large blood pressure shifts could probably cause the palpitations, and very high blood pressure might cause some respiratory symptoms.

Hope this is resolved soon for you!

Aaron

[dannyg]

@katyroq This is an old post but I been having a cough like this the last few days. Does it still happen ? The cough. ? 

[MeganMN]

One of the doctors explained it to me by saying that when we exercise or run or get our heart rates up and then stop, our system cannot equalize and we get this dump of catecholamines and our body cannot regulate them, so we get all these weird symptoms.

[katyroq]

@dannyg Yes the cough still happens, but I kind of do think it's related to blood pressure changes as someone mentioned above.  Here is why :

I started on fludrocortisone about a year ago, and i immediately started getting this same cough all the time. Even sitting down after standing would set off a coughing attack. It was crazy. After about 2 months which was how long it took me to adjust to the med, the cough was back to the normal frequency.  I assume there were a lot of blood pressure fluctuations at the beginning that may have contributed to the cough. (btw still taking fludro and after the initial rough few weeks it has changed my life!) 

@MeganMN thanks for sharing that insight from your doctor! I'm super sensitive to everything I put into my body so I could definitely believe that my body would react to that dump of catecholamines.