Symptom cycle - New member

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Hello,

my name is Florian and I’m 36 and I’m living in France.
I use to read this forum every day which I find very helpful thanks to people who take time to contribute.

My story is very similar to most of stories I have read on this forum:

On september 2015 I felt suddenly dizzy. I have visited my doctor who sent me to the urgency. I had scans, MRI, lumbar puncture etc. Everything was clear but I felt dizzy all the time with a very stiff neck, blurred vision, imbalance, and a lot of headaches.

On december 2015 I visited a neuro-otologist who did caloric test and VNG. He said it was a vestibular decompensation. So he gave me betaserc (betahistine) for 7 months and sent me to ocular therapy. Both medication and therapy did not help me. So he gave me medication for menière disease during 1 month without success. Then he sent me to vestibular therapy during 8 months. The therapy helped me for the blurred vision but not for the dizziness, the stiff neck and the headaches.

On April 2017, my oto-neuro sent me to the neuro who said this is a migraine condition because most of the time when I feel dizzy I have no headache and when I have headache I don’t feel dizzy. The dizziness is the migraine aura. I was to convinced because my symptoms were here all the time. She gave me Amitriptyline up to 25mg. With Amitriptyline, the intensity of the dizziness decreased but it is still here. That’s why she gave me candersartan in addition to the amitriptyline. I started this new med one month ago, for the moment I can not see the difference.

So I think my story is a standard story about MAV. But there is one thing I cannot see in other MAV stories:

On december 2016 I started to record my daily symptoms in a diary. I record the intensity of the dizziness and of the headaches. When I draw a graph with this data, I can clearly see a cycle of 21-24 days approximatively. The following picture shows this cycle with the graph of the dizziness (in blue) and the graph of the headaches from December 2016 to today. Just for info, I’m a male, so this not the cycle of my period.

dizziness.jpg800×355 73.3 KB

I think this is really strange but my neuro doesn’t care about it. Do you have the same kind of cycle ?
I tried the migraine diet without success but when I see this cycle, I don’t think food can be a trigger for me, the trigger is the calendar…

What do you think about it ? Thanks :slight_smile:

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Ahahaha :slight_smile:

Very interesting finding!

I did a similar graph to begin with and the doctor practically accused me of being ‘obsessed’!! :rage:

It’s great to see the trend of decreasing symptoms!!

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@Florian_Geffray That graph is awesome,it really shows the dizziness improvement with the Amitriptyline. I occasionally notice some cycles with my worst spells, but the length of time would stay the same for awhile then change. I used to have a few good days about every 4 to 8 weeks and then everything would seem to start all over again. Now the symptoms have become more unpredictable, but for awhile I could almost guess when those few good days could be. Lately I’ve seen 6 weeks of bad, awful dizziness and 6 weeks of more tolerable dizziness filled with more headaches. So I do think some sort of cycling is possible, but I have no idea why or how it happens.

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Yes it is really clear. It is a great tool because I find difficult to know if the last month is better or not than the current month without it. Because of the cycle pattern and of the progress of the symptoms which is too slow for seeing something.

I record my symptoms every days several times, but I draw the graph maybe once a month to avoid to be influenced by it.

Yes, sometimes I think the same thing about me but it is difficult to not be obsessed when you’re dizzy every day since 2 years…

1 Like
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Florian, back to your cycles: do these start with an ‘attack’ of some kind? I used to get attacks both migraines or vestibular attacks of great intensity, followed by gradual recovery for a few days to two or three weeks will steady improvements until the next ‘attack’. I no longer get these so my graph would be much flatter now. I’m no longer ‘dizzy’ but would describe my symptoms as variable imbalance and odd motion intolerance sensations.

Btw whilst I believe MAV is a thing I very much doubt it’s a migraine at root. Indeed I’ve been diagnosed with Secondary Hydrops by my latest doctor but symptoms are identical to everyone on here …

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First of all I have to say that I have an engineering degree so your data and graph are totally fascinating to me. On the Y-axis, what do the numbers represent? (0; 1,25; 2,5)

Second, there are some theories that men also have hormonal cycles.
https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=53725

In the above link, there is an interview with a psychotherapist who has studied the issue and has the following theories:

  1. Men’s testosterone, for instance, varies and goes up and down four or five times an hour.
  2. There are daily cycles with testosterone being higher in the morning and lower at night.
  3. Men have a monthly hormonal cycle that is unique to each man, but men can actually track their moods and recognize they are related to hormonal changes through the month.
  4. We know that there are seasonal cycles with testosterone higher in November and lower in April.

Hormones regulate many functions of the human body related to its metabolism. So it’s entirely possible that hormonal fluctuations could affect our brain chemicals.

I haven’t been good about keeping any sort of log but I think I will start trying to track my headaches, as mine seem to occur every couple of months or so. I’m female but I never noticed a correlation with “those” cycles (and I’m in my mid-50s so I’m done with them now). My headaches never occur with my dizziness (which I will also start tracking) and it never occurred to me that the two might be related until a year ago when a doctor told me about vestibular migraine. (I’m still not convinced that I have VM.)

Like you, it’s hard for me to believe that foods are a trigger for me, as I only get the headaches every couple of months and I get the dizzy spells maybe even less frequently than the headaches.

So, I wonder whether hormones play a big role for some of us.

AL

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[quote=“turnitaround, post:2, topic:14522”]
I did a similar graph to begin with and the doctor practically accused me of being ‘obsessed’!! :rage:[/quote]

I’ve found that some doctors appreciate the data. I have a spreadsheet of all of my blood test results, including a few from the 1980s. (Yes, I’m a geek.) I went to a new specialist last year (for a different issue, not the dizzy issue) and took some of the data from that spreadsheet with me. The doctor was really interested in it and spent some time looking at the trends of some of my tests over the past 10 years.

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Thanks to all of us for answering to my questions!

@turnitaround

Not really. Sometimes it starts suddenly but the intensity varies during several days: it may increase and then decrease to 0 two hours later and then restarts… And sometime it starts progressively… The graph is smoothed for showing the global evolution but if we zoom to a day it is more like a roller coaster. But the attack+recovery pattern is interesting, I will put more attention to the beginning of the next cycle to see if it can that.

@Manatee

I’m a geek too, and here is the demonstration: I made an app on my smartphone which allows me to quickly record the severity of the dizziness and of the headaches. So every days, I record between 3 to 10 entries for these two symptoms. The score is between 0 to 3 with 0 for ‘nothing’ and 3 for ‘very high’. The app makes an average for the day. For example for a day:

entry1: dizzy:0 headache:1
entry2: dizzy:1 headache:0
entry3: dizzy:1 headache:0

gives for the day:

dizzy:0.66 headache:0.33

Then I export the data to Apple Numbers (similar to MS Excel) and finally I draw the 2 curves with an average window of 7 days for removing the noise.

So for answering to your question, the Y axis is the severity of the symptom which is the result of this average.
Also thanks for the link about Irritable Male Syndrome, I will read it this week-end.

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Please do but let me tell you my attacks were usually so intense and disturbing you would not have missed them had you had them! :). At the beginning I would be forced to stare at a spot on the wall for over 10 hours unable to move my head or close my eyes or I would need to throw up. Later these attacks would morph but always the attack/recovery cycle.