Waveform Graph Anxiety
I know this is an AFIB group, but figured y’all maybe have more insight:
Hey all, I’m a 25-year-old male who is obese. I’m 5'9" and weigh 280 lbs. I’m about to begin my journey of losing weight, but I’m worried about the waveform graphs from the phone app I use to check my heart rate. I’m an inquisitive and impulsive person, so I have a tendency to focus on small details and fixate on them. I’ve included my heart rate graphs— a few random examples of different heart rates.
I have unmanaged hypertension (to what degree, we don’t know), but the issue is that we can’t get a baseline due to my health anxiety. It spikes anytime I get near a blood pressure cuff, whether at home or at the doctor’s office. On a few occasions, when I’ve tried to remain calm, I’ve seen it come down substantially to near normal. I started dealing with health anxiety in 2021, so it’s been a few years. I have Apple Watch data (from when I had one) in 2019, and my sleeping heart rate was in the 40s and 50s, and my resting heart rate, when super relaxed, would be in the low 50s to low 60s. As expected, it raises with movement, especially with the extra weight. I did some research and learned about dicrotic notches. The fact that I have faint ones or sometimes don’t have them at all could signal something to do with artery stiffening, but it’s typically something that happens after a long time, not at my age. I’m just concerned and would like some clarity on whether or not I should be worried about these graphs. I just had a physical and underwent numerous tests, ranging from CBC to autoimmune to urinalysis—everything was mostly normal. My A1C was great, etc. I went to the ER in January, and they tested all my enzymes (normal), did a chest x-ray, and an EKG—everything was normal. I was sinus tachycardic at the time due to my sheer terror of clinical settings.
The last photo, the 85 BPM reading(pink highlighted), is from my girlfriend. You can see the clearer notches. Does this matter? Am I hyperanalyzing this based on nothing? I do occasionally get normal ones, or ones with more defined notches, too. It just depends.
Before anyone says anything, yes, I know, I should talk to my doctor—he does a poor job responding since I’m part of a large network, but I plan on transferring out.