UnTouchablePostural tachycardia syndrome (PoTS)
Postural tachycardia syndrome, usually shortened to PoTS, is when your heart rate rises sharply after you stand up from sitting or lying down, and stays up. It often makes people dizzy or lightheaded. It can also cause palpitations, chest pain, breathlessness, sweating, fainting, headaches, stomach and bowel problems, changes in vision, and trouble concentrating that many people call brain fog. It is more common in people who have long COVID, chronic fatigue syndrome, or hypermobile joints. Heat, standing for a long time, dehydration, alcohol, large meals high in carbohydrate and periods can all make symptoms worse. A GP can begin by measuring your heart rate and blood pressure lying down and then standing up. Blood tests, an ECG and a referral for further heart and blood pressure monitoring may follow. There is no cure, but PoTS can be managed. The NHS describes drinking more fluid, eating smaller meals with less carbohydrate, and compression clothing, with medicines such as fludrocortisone or beta blockers for some people.
This is a plain summary, not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for talking to your GP or your clinical team. For NHS information about postural tachycardia syndrome (pots), speak to your GP or call NHS 111.
People who have talked about it
1 story, each one written in our own words from what the person said publicly themselves.
Ella Mills
Ella Mills spent most of a year in bed, taking 25 medications a day
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Ella Mills was twenty and halfway through university when she became ill. She was diagnosed with postural tachycardia syndrome — PoTS — along with other conditions affecting her autonomic nervous system, the part of the body that runs the things nobody thinks about: heart rate, blood pressure, digestion. What it meant day to day was that standing up was hard. She describes her heart rate climbing to between 150 and 180 beats a minute when she stood, while her blood pressure fell, leaving her too dizzy to move. Around that came chronic fatigue, brain fog, IBS, acid reflux and other digestive problems, repeated infections, headaches, pain across her body, and a growing sense of depression and anxiety. She spent most of the following year in bed or unable to leave the house. At the peak she was taking twenty-five different medications a day, and says none of them made a difference she could feel. In May 2012 she changed what she ate, and started writing about it. The blog became Deliciously Ella and then a food company. Her health, she says, stabilised, and she has been off medication for more than eight years. That is her account, in the order she tells it, and this page does not go further than that. Nothing here is medical advice, and none of it is evidence that changing a diet treats PoTS. The NHS says PoTS has no cure and is managed rather than fixed — more fluid, smaller meals with less carbohydrate, compression clothing, and for some people medicines, worked out with a GP. Anyone thinking about stopping a medicine they have been prescribed should speak to the doctor who prescribed it.