in a few months After giving birth to my son in March 2019, my Fitbit started recording abnormal heart rate readings. Pregnancy increases your resting heart rate by about 20 beats per minute, but your heart rate returns to normal levels within a few weeks after giving birth. Instead, my resting heart rate continued to rise steadily after giving birth, and this trend was accompanied by other puzzling symptoms, such as fatigue that persisted no matter how much sleep I slept. Persistent mild dizziness. And no matter how hard I work out, I can’t get back to my previous fitness level.
It took years and dozens of doctor’s visits and tests to find the answer, but this resting heart rate change is what I believe is a form of autonomic imbalance called orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. It was one of the first clues that I had developed the disease.
Wearable technology such as Fitbit, Apple Watch, Oura Ring, Whoop, or other commercial devices offer a convenient way to collect personal data about health trends, such as resting heart rate, heart rate variability information, and more. . Sleep time, or total activity level.
What’s less clear is what all this data means, especially if some of your measurements are abnormal or you’re dealing with an undiagnosed symptom. “What we have now is a health and wellness industry that provides data-driven insights and data-driven advice as long as the physiology is typical,” says Physical Therapy at Mount Sinai in New York City. says David Putrino, who studies “A critical need is to apply the same principles to groups of people with complex chronic diseases and abnormal physiology.”
For the foreseeable future, many chronically ill patients will continue to live with their chronic illness, relying on their own knowledge of their condition and the data they can access using various health trackers to find a system that works for them. relying on the creation of , symptoms fluctuate from day to day.
For many patients, this creativity is born out of desperation. Because many of these diseases, such as prolonged COVID-19, dysautonomia, and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), have very few treatments available and cannot be treated. This is because there are even fewer specialists available. We are trained to recognize and treat them. “The system isn’t set up to handle these more complex and invisible situations, so we’re forced to do it ourselves,” says Strong, a post-concussion syndrome sufferer.・ Spencer Gudewill, co-founder of the Hoolers, said: Help people with chronic conditions use wearable technology to manage their condition. “A lot of people slip through that crack.”
Your resting heart rate is a red flag
Resting heart rate has long been used as an indicator of overall health, averaging between 60 and 100. People who are in good physical condition and have a high fitness level generally have stronger and stronger hearts, so they tend to have lower heart rates. Trained athletes often report resting heart rates below 60 beats per minute. An elevated resting heart rate, or an increase over time, often indicates a worsening health condition, such as an increased risk of heart attack.
Short-term changes in resting heart rate are often used to determine if an athlete is overtraining, but changes can also be a sign of an infectious disease such as the flu or COVID-19. . In a study published in Journal of the American Medical Association Using Fitbit data, researchers found that COVID-19 causes resting heart rates to rise and take an average of about 79 days to return to normal.
