I know this isn't about SVT, but do you have bad palpitations when you are bloated? I'm having some stomach problems for a few days now and when I can't pass gas or can't burp I'm having palps. I'm scared that it will go into an episode of SVT. 😟
I’ve been diagnosed with SVT over 6 years ago, but just this past week, I’ve also had some stomach problems. I noticed I’ve been getting palpitations around my upper abdomen area. I’m taking meds for my SVT, so I haven’t had an SVT attack since I’ve been taking the meds.
My stomach has been bloated, too!
It can feel like its going to but I think your just feeling alot of gas paint in the upper left part of your intestines. take maximum strengh phazyme you can get it at the pharmacy. If you smoke, drink cokes any thing fizzy, and eat gas building foods its going to give you these problems oh and stop drinking from straws it causes air in intestines.
I have had ectopic heartbeats for 30 odd years and svt for 10 years ( ablation 7 wks ago) but i remember years ago a cardio saying in relation to ectopics and palps that your vagus nerve runs across top of stomach and having full or bloated stomach can trigger both palps and ectopics and this was def a cause for me. He said, years ago they called it having a windy heart as bloat and palps went tog but back then they didnt know reason so windy heart was good description!
Windy heart - never heard of this phrase so far! Maybe that’s the case for me. How was your ablation, if I may ask? How are you feeling after it?
Yes it’s called gastrocardiac syndrome. If you go have a look on youtube at Dr Sanjay Gupta’s videos from York Cardiology he explains all about it.
I have had alot of ectopic beats daily since ablation with runs of them and sometimes tachycardia attacks. I was warned it takes months for heart to calm down after ablation. Cardio was sure ablation was a success but only time will tell!
I have a lot of problems with heart flutters when |I am bloated. I try really hard to burp it up, but until you get that good one up it continues to go on. |Once that good one comes, the flutters stop. Most doctors do not connect the stomach/heart connection.
As someone mentioned, |Dr Sanjay Gupta has wonderful videos on youtube. He explains everything, and makes you feel so much better. I am fortunate to have him as a facebook friend, and am now receiving messages on whatsap from him
Absolutely!!! Being bloated puts pressure on your AV node, heart and cardiac sack. I have noticed that the less I eat at one meal, the less chance I have of an SVT incident. Being bloated prevents using the val salvia maneuver (sticking a toothbrush down your throat to stimulate your gag reflect). I would recommend eating slowly. Try counting to 50 with each bite as you chew. You will feel full much faster and it will help digest your food. My last two SVTs was waking up at night and waking in the morning that resulted in visits to the local hospital. The gag reflect would not work. Also avoid Advil, ibuprofen. I know this is what damaged my av node. Please feel free to contact me any time.
Just so you know… the valsalva does not involved putting anything down your throat!!
I have read good and bad results from cardiac ablation. It depends on the doctor performing this procedure. I have been in the medical field taking care of all kinds of patience. I would highly recommend you visit the cardiac floor of your hospital. Size up the nurses to make sure you get a new nurse, maybe a recent grad and ask who they would recommend for cardiac ablation. If you don’t get a response, go to another nurse at a different nurse’s station. Good luck.
I will check out the video. Thanks
Yes it did. I taught Cardiopulmonary resuscitation to nurses and other medical personnel in the seventies and early eighties. Things do change year after year. I always had to contact our cardiac docs for changes in terminology and techniques. Some docs still advise sticking something down your throat to initiate the gag reflex. Even the last ER doc I had 2 weeks ago.
I am a Nurse and this is the description of the Valsalva manouvre. What you’re describing may convert an SVT but is not the way the valsalva is recommended to patients.
“The Valsalva maneuver or Valsalva manoeuvre is performed by moderately forceful attempted exhalation against a closed airway, usually done by closing one’s mouth, pinching one’s nose shut while pressing out as if blowing up a balloon.”
I am a Nurse and this is the description of the Valsalva manouvre. What you’re describing may convert an SVT but is not the way the valsalva is recommended to patients.
“The Valsalva maneuver or Valsalva manoeuvre is performed by moderately forceful attempted exhalation against a closed airway, usually done by closing one’s mouth, pinching one’s nose shut while pressing out as if blowing up a balloon.”
The recommended Valsalva for SVT patients is the Modified Valsalva which has a high conversion rate and doesn’t involved sticking anything down the throat either. You can find videos of it online.
Yes! Definitely a huge stomach-heart connection, via the Vagus nerve. I hope there will be increased research into this phenomenon.
I am experiencing this right now, having some tummy troubles and my heartbeat is very weak and erratic, with a lot of ectopics. I know it’s nothing serious but it is bothersome! And yes it does feel like a higher chance of SVT, though it’s not necessarily true.
I started to take a strong probiotic every morning, it helps not only the stomach but the heart.
The reason I am having these palpitations now is just that I ran out of my probiotic. otherwise I am completely free of my ectopics since starting the probiotic. Might not work for everyone but hopefully. I also stay away from gluten, processed foods, sugar, and salt. Whole foods small meals seem to do the trick (look into Ayurveda if you’re interested in that sort of philosophy of food).
Good luck
I’ve lived with SVT for over 30 years now, but I think I may have finally found the cure to my condition.
SVT first appeared for me when I was teenager, and it was fairly frequent to the point that I had to start taking beta blockers to prevent it. When I went off to college I started exercising more frequently and found that exercise helped and that I could wean myself of the beta blockers over time. That led to a long stretch of time in my life where the SVT episodes pretty much stopped. I might have maybe one episode a year (if that), and usually I could stop it almost instantly by bearing down, or one of the other valsalva maneuvers. This was pretty much the case throughout my 20’s and 30’s and even into my early 40’s.
But then when I hit my mid 40’s something changed. Not only did the SVT episodes increase in frequency, but they lasted longer and become harder for me to convert, with valsalva maneuvers being ineffective. Needless to say this began to negatively impact my life. I had become somewhat sedentary in recent years, so I tried to go back to the old method of using exercise to put the SVT back into “remission”. That worked well for about 6 months and then I had an SVT episode for the first time in my life that was brought on during exercise. SVT being triggered during exercise started to happen more and more frequently until I had to just stop exercising at all.
At that point I felt the only options left for me were to go back onto medication or go the ablation route. I’m a bit of a chicken and reading about some of the ablation risks which included wiping out the AV node and requiring a pacemaker for the rest of my life, I decided medication was the safer route, and was prescribed Atenelol (a beta blocker) 50 mg daily. I’ve never been a big fan of popping pills, preferring more of a functional medicine approach, so I decided if I was going to have to go on medication that I would try to take the minimum dose needed to be effective. I started with cutting the pills in half to see if a smaller dose would work and it did, so I began taking 25 mg Atenelol daily.
This helped tremendously with getting my life back to where I could be functional. But I would find that sometimes if I was late taking my daily medication, I would have an SVT episode kick-in. So during that first year back on medication I maybe had 3 or 4 episodes, usually in the morning if I was late in taking my daily Atenelol. These instances became more frequent over time and even began occurring later in the day even after I had already taken my medication, so I decided it was time to up the dosage to the 50 mg that was prescribed. Unfortunately that didn’t work either and I had an SVT episode while on an airplane, which I can tell you is an extremely frightening experience. Luckily it had not taken off yet and I had to deplane and take a later flight after my heart rate converted to normal. At that point I realized I was pretty much out of options. I could no longer count on the Atenelol to keep the SVT at bay, and the SVT was going to drastically interfere with my ability to lead a normal life. So, I might finally be forced to go the ablation route against my better judgment.
I decided that before I bit the bullet on giving in to an ablation, that I would give the functional medicine approach one last shot. Deep in my gut (pun intended as you will see) I knew that there had to be some underlying causing the SVT. That the SVT was just a symptom of some underlying issue and that the medicines or ablations were just bandaids to cover up the symptom (SVT). If I could just figure out the root cause of the SVT and fix it, that would be a much better outcome than taking on the risks inherent with ablation with no guarantee even that the ablation would work or that some other symptom might crop up in place of the SVT.
So, I began pouring over message boards, watching youtube videos, reading research papers, Googling for hours trying to find some answers. I found the information about the Gastrocardiac or “Roemheld Syndrome” and immediately recognized the connection. Often times I would have a strange feeling in my stomach almost like I had to burp but couldn’t (trapped gas), and these would almost always immediately precede an SVT onset. I seemed like something was irritating my Vagus nerve and that irritation was getting worse and worse over time making the SVT become more and more intractable. So, I felt confident that I had found the root cause, but what to do to fix it was the harder problem. Also, how did all of this fit the timing of the more frequent SVT period of my teenage years, the remission through my 20’s and 30’s and then the increasing severity through my mid forties up until now? The answer it turns out was in digestive health…
As I began to study more about digestive disorders, I found that many digestive disorders and inflammatory digestive conditions could be caused by food sensitivities, and leaky gut, as well as gut bacteria overgrowth (SIBO). I got some testing done at a Naturopath and it showed I had all of these things going on. So, I started eliminating certain foods I was sensitive to (gluten, dairy, egg whites) and that helped to a minor extent but the SVT and the “trapped gas” feeling remained. I decided to go even further with the AIP diet (auto-immune paleo) and again this maybe had a minor impact, but the trapped air feeling and SVT remained. With as restrictive as the AIP diet already was, I felt there was nothing left to try and that maybe my digestive system was permanently damaged and there would be no holistic “cure” for me.
Then in one day of Google searching I found the nugget that would change my life forever…
It was an online PDF of a book from 1975 called “the Stone Age Diet” by Walter L. Voegtlin. The theory presented in the book is that the protein and fat are more easily digested and assimilated by the human digestive system than carbohydrates and fiber. Also, the cumulative effects from chronic stress from modern life will have a tendency to make the digestive process less efficient over time. So, stress coupled with a high carb, or even worse, a high fiber diet, will eventually lead to functional distress. This specific passage really resonated with me…
“The esophagus manifests its irritability as isolated spasms which cause the feeling of a lump or a sensation of pressure in the chest. This feeling of pressure is interpreted by the patient as coming from some gas that has “formed” in his digestive tract. He forces “burps” or belches in an effort to get rid of what he believes is gas but which, as already mentioned, is merely a muscular spasm of the esophagus”
My SVTs were almost certainly triggered by the esophageal spasms (irritating the vagus nerve) described above. So, the solution would be to go on what Voegtlin prescribed as the diet that is most optimized for efficient digestion and eliminating digestive disorders. That “Stone Age” diet is basically an all meat diet or what is today gaining popularity as the “Carnivore Diet”. More can be learned about this diet if one simply Googles carnivore diet.
I am happy to say that the Stone Age, or Carnivore diet has been the cure for my SVT. I have successfully weaned off my medication entirely and have been SVT free for going on one year and the feelings of trapped gas in my stomach (esophageal spasms) have vanished as well. Knowing what I know now, and looking back at previous periods in my life I am making connections that I never realized at the time. I had mentioned above that my teenage years were a time of increased SVT and then it went into “remission” in my 20’s and 30’s. The connection I never made until now was that during my teenage years I became a vegetarian, and then gave it up when I went to college. Because I had been brainwashed into thinking vegetarian diet was healthy I never would have suspected this as a cause of the more frequent SVT in my teens, and I just assumed it was increased exercise in my 20’s and 30’s that put the SVT into remission rather than my return to eating meat (although the exercise probably helped reduce stress which also aids digestive health). And, when SVT returned with a vengeance in my mid-forties was also when I decided, ironically for “health reasons” (so misguided), to start doing a vegan whole food diet which dramatically increased the amount of fiber I was eating. And, my SVT not coincidentally returned with a vengeance as a result.
I am eternally grateful that I was lucky enough to find the work of Dr. Voegtlin. It has saved my life! So, I just had to share this personal story, in hopes that maybe it might help someone else find answers to what often seems like a hopeless struggle.
Hello Bill,
Thank you for that. How wonderful is it to hear these stories.
Unlike you, I did not have |SVT in my earlier years.
Mine started Feb 2016 when I was 61 years old.
I had a terrible cold, and I still think to this day that this cold virus triggered my SVT I ask the doctors this, but they say no. I understand that the coughing can help an episode, but I am talking about the fact that the virus itself started this nonsense. They just do not get it.
I did the beta blocker thing. But only for about 3 months. I felt just terrible. I had no energy and could not get off the sofa. I had very cold hands and feet, and my blood pressure and heart rate got very low ( and I was also taking blood pressure meds too)
I did go for an attempted ablation. I was told to stop the beta block 5 days before. I asked it that was okay to just stop. He answered that it is no problem But it was a problem. I had extreme anxiety and many physical symptoms. At the time I did not recognize this as withdrawals, but thought I had a problem with anxiety. I was then put on 2 med for that. Trazodone and a benzo. If I had known then what I know now…
This just opened a box of problems for me. I finally after about a year or so, started the grueling task of weaning off these 2 meds. It was the hardest thing I| have ever done in my life. After the first attempted ablation, I told my Ep that I would rather have SVT than be on those terrible beta blockers
So here I am, 3 years later…3 attempted ablations,withdrawal symptoms that are protracted…but beta blocker free
Hi Bill,
Laurent from France here, similar story and symptomes, the connexion between gut health and extrasystoles is clear. I am going carnivore today, thank you so much for sharing.