Racing heart

[EssBee1]

My wife just had very fast heartbeat,  up to 120, at rest in bed and felt very uncomfortable.
It had happened me a few years ago, but I couldn't recall  what how I normalized  it!
Read these sides thinking Magnesium was the thing. Then it struck: I took a teaspoon of sea-salt and my heartbeat went from ~120  down to 80 in 5 minutes.   Today  my wife got a glass with electrolyte powder dissolved in. Her
heart beat normalized within minutes as well. She had no skipped beats before or after. I had before but since
I sorted myself with the sea salt I have never had any more skipped beats.
Sadly the medical procedure for this is some kind of electric shock!  I know a vegeterian  ( naturally too little salt in diet) who was treated with that, long before we found out.  Is it just electrolytes then ?  
Can this be useful in intensive sports ?




This discussion is related to Really worried about irregular heart beat.

[grendslori]

When a person takes in to much salt, the blood pressures raises and the heart rate decreases as a result. Having read that the wife had been sick and vomiting for a few days prior to her heart rates being raised makes sense; she was dehydrated and the treatment for that is to give fluids with salt. That would be the normal proceedure for combating dehydration. As a result of all of that, her pulse rate would come down. Having too much salt intake causes high blood pressure and that can result in develo-ping a form of Cardiomyopathy, which isn't good. Sea salt is different than regular table salt and is used more where people live around water. Here in the States, I only knew about sea salt because my mother was from northern Italy so she grew up around the Meditaranian Sea. Most people here in this country, never used it. When you drink a lot of water, you are flushing out your system of the electrolytes; you will at least cause an imbalance if you are not careful and as a result can have problems with irregular heart beats. I do believe that if the body is missing something, such as salt, it will make you have a craving for it. Your wife would actually have been fine without adding the salt to the electrolytes that she was drinking; the sodium was already part of the solution.she was drinking.

[EssBee1]

Just to fill you in, she had had her racing pulse for about  24 hours when she told me about it as it was getting worse. It took me about an hour until I recalled the salt. After the first glass of electrolyte - a powder one can take after vomiting etc., she got much better. I wrote the post then. 30 minutes later she was still a bit shaky and took another glass - plus some sea salt. Then all came  back to normal.
You are of course still free to believe it was "coincindental". To put you more in the picture, her state was apparently brought on by a tummy bug + vomiting  two days before and very little food since.
I spent a few days in hospital in same room as a guy who had just "arrythmyia". Pleased to hear that "electric shock" isn't the standard treatment, but that was what he got, 4 years ago. ~140 was his rate before and it dropped after, ok. He had had an heart attack 10 years before an taken all warnings about diet and turned vegetarian. I still believe that the loss of salt caused by  switch from a meat-based to a veggie diet could have been a major part of his problem, that grew over years actually, to the point where I met him. Vegetarian animals - see one of David Attenbourough's films - are  seeking out salt regularly  when they feel it is required.  Taking in a bit of background  to the picture may also explain, like the preceding loss of electrolytes in the case of my wife. When this happened to me several years before, I was drinking a lot of water and reduced food intake to lose weight. After about a week I noticed the  racing heart, which got worse by the day. When I tried some sea salt it felt better very quickly, and with more the  heart beat normalized within minutes, a great feeling!   But what are normal "electrolytes" and how are they measured?  There must be quicker ways than serum testing of a number of the minerals like Na, K,Mg etc., I mean something  like a conductivity test, maybe of serum. Today I think the anti-salt craze may have been a complete mix-up with the junk food as transfat-dipped chips and sugary ketchup that the high salt diet combined with.  In Sweden we were eating many times more salt before the era of junk food -and heart attacks- , when salted meat and salted herring was the winter staple.

[RadioAstronomyObserver]

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying with the suggestion of doubting pulse rate drop as he suggested.  Could be I'm just reading it all wrong(?).  My father needed magnesium because of his heart rate.  It was 168 and obviously uncomfortable since he asked to be checked out and it wasn't till well after getting to the hospital and blood tests and then the magnesium that it came back down to normal.  I don't know enough about this to suggest the salt did anything but relating one story to the other I can see how it may have.

[grendslori]

For a pulse rate to drop from 120 doewn to 80 over a course of several minute is perfectly normal behaviour on the part of the heart's own electrical system. Usually it drops back down to normal after a period of 3 minutes, so I doubt seriously that the salt had anything to do with it, not the powder that your wife took. The medical procedure for treating heart rates of 120 is NOT electric shock unless the person is in cardiac arrest from a slow rated Ventricular Tachycardia. Very fast rates such as A-Fib, A-Flutter and Ventricular Arrhythmias, all of which can be life threatening, are the problems reserved for cardioverions (electrical shock). Electrolytes, if out of balance, can cause premature beats greater than the normal degree, especially potassium.