Dr. Robert Whitfield has seen more MCAS patients with medical implants and is removing them as potential triggers. He describes mixed results: one POTS patient improved moderately, another's blood pressure normalized, but he remains uncertain why or how to best treat the connection.
I see more and more patients who have been given the diagnosis of mast cell syndrome and have implants. And so they're trying to like take things off their plate and away from them that could trigger them. And I recently had a patient with POTS, and POTS was extremely frustrating because I don't have a lot of experience with it.
Right.
And then of the patients we've taken care of, there's been like a very limited amount of sample size to draw any conclusions from responses. So I had one patient with like a moderate response, and they have one patient who's like, oh my gosh, my blood pressure is fine now. And I'm like, well, I don't know what to do about that.
No, but it does seem that there's a good subset of patients with POTS who have MCAS. There are other forms of POTS, and I'm always careful to say that because I know sometimes the audience gets a little frustrated because some— there may be people who have POTS who don't have MCAS, and there are other reasons that you can get But generally, in my patient population, I'm, you know, they're coming to me because they have symptoms that resemble MCAS. And if they have POTS, I'm assuming that there's a correlation. And so for some, you can definitely target the MCAS and their POTS can get better. If the MCAS, if the mast cells are driving that because they're in the nervous system. So if you calm them down, a lot of them get better.
