Manage POTS and other forms of Dysautonomia with Guava

Symptom tracking

Start by logging your symptoms daily, or as they come up. You can record all the details you want, like intensity, frequency, and duration of symptoms like fatigue, dizziness, or a rapid heart rate. The body map feature allows you to pinpoint the exact location of symptoms, and over time a ‘heat map’ will be generated that shows you which areas tend to flare up the most.

Guava also lets you make custom symptoms and symptom groups that might be unique to your kind of dysautonomia. Your symptom groups might include:

Med management

In Guava, you can create custom medication schedules, complete with reminders so that you don’t miss a dose. If you take certain medications or supplements to manage your POTS or dysautonomia, logging frequency and dosage can help your provider assess the severity of your symptoms and effectiveness of treatments.

Heart Rate monitoring:

Guava automatically syncs with your health monitoring devices to collect any and all available data about your heart rate. This allows you to understand how your heart rate is changing over long periods and throughout the day.

Guava also integrates Heart Rate Variability (HRV) data, which is an important indicator of how well your heart is responding to changes like exercise, stress, or standing up after lying for a while. A lower HRV is common in POTS patients, so this data combined with a higher than normal heart rate can be a good diagnostic clue for POTS or other forms of dysautonomia. By comparing these changes with activity, medications, or food, salt, and water intake, Guava can be an incredibly useful tool for identifying triggers and learning how to keep symptoms at bay.

Urine tracking:

The urine tracking feature in Guava allows you to keep track of relevant information like amount, color, and any associated symptoms, like pain. Comprehensive logging of urine can be useful in ensuring adequate hydration, evaluating the effectiveness of dietary changes like increased salt intake, medication changes, and monitoring for signs of potential complications.

Sodium:

There are a couple of ways to log sodium in Guava. The first is through food logging. If you already track food, you can simply add info about salt intake in the nutrient information section.

The other way you can log salt intake through Guava is by creating a custom type and labeling it salt (or whatever makes sense to you).

Insights

All the data you log in Guava, including your symptoms, activities, and medications are analyzed in the Insights feature. Insights help you pick out patterns and correlations relevant to your dysautonomia that might not have been obvious before. For instance, Insights can reveal whether certain foods exacerbate POTS symptoms, if certain meds have unintended side effects, or if some are more effective than others for pain management.

Visit Prep

Guava can also consolidate this data into Visit Preps, which are sharable reports for your doctors. Visit Prep reports give providers a comprehensive overview of your POTS or dysautonomia-related history, both recent and long-term. Visit Preps can cover past medical history, what you’ve recently tracked in Guava, and any key patterns or triggers that have been identified. For example, if your current medication doesn’t seem to be improving your heart rate fluctuations, Visit Prep is built to be your advocacy sidekick by showing your doctor concrete data. The Visit Prep feature also helps you come up with questions relevant to your conditions to ensure you’re getting the most out of your appointment.

For more insights on managing POTS symptoms, check out our related article: POTS and EDS: Improving resources for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Patients