Respiration rate

[April_May]

Do you find your respiration rate is relevant to your heart health? I find when I get chest pains my breathing rate is really really slow. The other night at 1am, before I headed into A&E I could only manage 4 breaths per minute, I couldn’t increase it, I felt really stuck, like my chest was being crushed. Normal for me is around 6 right now. If I try to increase to match my partners rate (which is normal at around 12) it feels really wrong, but at my rate I have chest pains and find easy levels of exercise challenging. ECG and bloods at hospital were normal, got my first appointment with cardiologist next week.

[Doug6969]

I know when I have had issues my respriarstion increases to a crazy amount. This has been caused by dehydration and before my op blocked arteries. In both cases my body trying to feed me more oxygen.

Sound like when you have your angina attacks your body has relaxed too much which causes the pain. Total opposite to what your body should do. Would love to hear the outcome of this.

I wish you good luck and hope it gets solved quickly.

[April_May in reply to Doug6969]

Cheers, I’ll keep you posted! Everything I read generally talks about increasing respiration rate, apart from sleep apnoea so it’s definitely a bit odd. I only really noticed the first time when I went to doctors and A&E and they were asking me to take deep breaths but then would move to another point and ask me to take another breath but I couldn’t, they were moving too fast for me!

I haven’t been diagnosed with anything yet, but I’ll hopefully be able to update next week.

[Doug6969 in reply to April_May]

Good luck and let’s hope they find a solution.

[Milkfairy Heart Star in reply to April_May]

Hi April_ May

My respiratory rate is low too usually about 8 per minute drops lower when I am using breathing techniques to manage my vasospastic angina pain.

When I am in hospital I keep setting the alarms off on the cardiac monitor as my respiratory rate frequently drops below 8 per minute. This is a problem as I am on IV nitrates and morphine so need to be monitored.

I hope your appointment goes well and your Cardiologist is able to see beyond the usual causes of angina.