Postural Tachycardia Syndrome

Postural Tachycardia Syndrome (PoTS) can be a life altering and debilitating chronic health condition.  Simply standing up can be a challenge for people with PoTS as their body is unable to adjust to gravity. PoTS is characterised by orthostatic intolerance (the development of symptoms when upright that are relieved by lying down).  Symptoms include headaches, fatigue, palpitations, sweating, nausea, fainting and dizziness and are associated with an increase in heart rate from the lying to upright position of greater than 30 beats per minute, or a heart rate of greater than 120 beats per minute within 10 minutes of standing. 

Our Stories

Lauren: Piecing the jigsaw together - EDS and PoTS

As a child I was always accident prone, would often complain of joint pain and had severe asthma also. My mum tried to convince doctors that there was something wrong, but they ignored her passing my pain off as 'growing pains'. As I got older the pain got worse and the chest pain developed into having further symptoms - I would often have dizzy spells, heart palpitations followed by immediate shortness of breath (in a different way to asthma attacks - it felt it was coming from the centre of my chest rather than down the bottom), feel faint, have blurred, double or tunnel vision, instant headaches when I stood up, and many other typical symptoms from PoTS.