LindsayIf you are ever interested in reading any news articles that mention postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) or dysautonomia, I have a Scoop.it page where I collect such articles. Some are stories in small town papers about a local teenager with POTS, others are scholastic journal articles.
Dysautonomia International, a non-profit that seeks to raise awareness for all types of dysautonomia, recently released a preliminary study conducted by Dr. Steven Vernino. The study tested POTS patients and controls for serum muscarinic receptor anitbodies (M1, M2 and M3). Muscarinic receptors are acetylcholine receptors that form G-protein receptor complexes in cell membranes. They are part of the parasympathetic nervous system (the part of the autonomic nervous system that controls the “rest and digest” functions like slowing heartrate, stimulating diegstion, etc.), and antibodies bind to the receptors it may cause problems with parasympathetic nerve messaging.
The results showed POTS patients had a significantly higher presence of M1 (87.5% of POTS patients had) and M2 (68.75% of POTS patients had) than the controls. Read more here. This could indicate an autoimmune component to POTS, although more research is needed. Researchers will be looking for more POTS test subjects at the Dysautonomia International conference this summer in Washington, D.C. I am not affiliated with Dysautonomia International in any way, so if you have questions regarding the study, please contact DI.
I wish I could go to the conference, as I would love to get tested for the antibodies, but unfortunately that’s too much travel for me to handle. Hopefully in a few years the study will be available to all of us!
Smell ya later.
– Linds
This would make sense. I have diabetes, so everything gets blamed on that, but when I was diagnosed with neurocardiogenic syncope and dysautonomia, my diabetes was fairly ‘new’, and my blood sugars were in control. (1996 for diagnoses of dysautonmia; 1995 for diabetes- though blood sugars were likely out of control for a couple of years before then).
As an RN who worked neuro for years, I thought I was nuts when I first started passing out, turning purple-red, getting blotchy, having blue fingernails, etc. I’m not sure how I thought my mind was dropping my blood pressure (44/16 on the tilt table test) or making my heart rate flip into the 140 range. But I told my neurologist that if I was nuts, she could tell me and I’d go see a shrink. She assured me that I wasn’t nuts.
I now have psoriasis (autoimmune), so that adds to the plausibility for my situation that the dysautonomia could also be a ‘self-attack’. It’s good to have more research being done on what used to be referred to as hysteria.
very interesting! sounds like your dysautonomia might have an autoimmune component. i hope they make the antibodies test available to all of us soon – i’d love to know a little more about what caused my dysautonomia!