Posted by Honore on June 9, 2007, at 1:19:26
In reply to Re: Does anyone here use a BP monitor for MAOIs? » girlnterrupted78, posted by psychobot5000 on June 9, 2007, at 0:53:01
A BP monitor is different from a heart-rate monitor. The latter can't be substituted for the former, although BP monitors often give your pulse rate, as well. There are causes of high heart rate that have nothing to do with blood pressure; even if your heart rate went up, you really couldn't know that it was related to eating anything.
One problem with monitoring specific instances of eating foods, in order to establish their effects, is that there's no prescribed period of time, such as 15 minutes, between ingestion of food and a hypertensive episode. So you really would have to take your blood pressure a lot even in the first instance--just to get a general idea of how you react to certain substances.
Secondly, eating certain foods, if you had a reaction, could be additive-- if you ate whatever it was once, in a certain period, you might be okay. But if you ate the same thing every night for five days,-- or several times fairly close together-- you might go over the threshold and set off a reaction.
You can't rely on the reaction to one instance of eating something, say soy sauce-- unless you ate the same amount infrequently. You can have a some comfort level-- in monitoring-- but it's not absolute. So if you had a known amount of soy sauce one time-- and had no reaction, you could probably have that amount occasionally. But you'd have to hold the amount fairly constant, and be careful about frequency.
Honore
poster:Honore
thread:761947
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070604/msgs/761959.html