PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – POTS is a life-changing disease and cases are on the rise. People with POTS find the symptoms debilitating and many struggle to find relief.

It affects people who previously appeared healthy. Often, this can appear in serious athletes and marathon runners, making the situation even more devastating when these individuals begin to experience a rapid heart rate, dizziness, and severe fatigue.

When we get up from a chair, our body uses gravity and pushes blood in the right direction. Our blood vessels constrict and our heart rate may increase a bit. In people with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, their heart starts beating much too fast, blood pressure becomes wonky, and they feel weak and often faint.

“They may feel dizzy, in the worst case, dizzy, pass out and fall to the ground,” said Dr. William Barrington, chief of cardiology at UPMC Shadyside.

Barrington kind of took it upon himself to create a safe space and a program to help.

“A lot of my patients that I deal with are young women and the problem is that young women are often seen as having anxiety attacks or panic attacks as the cause and very often they become very frustrated by that” , he said.

Catrina Vargo is one of these women.

“It was pretty desperate. There’s a lot of people who maybe don’t believe you or you try to find specialists and no one really specializes in it and it was hard to know what was going on. It took me about a month and a half to get a diagnosis,” she said.

Vargo crossed the finish line of the 2022 Pittsburgh Marathon, but was hit with a wall of symptoms just two days later.

“Every time I went to urgent care they would tell me ‘you’re fine, you’re fine, your vitals seem fine, go home’ and I knew something was wrong and in the end of that May, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t get out of bed, I could barely stop myself from helping, I couldn’t prepare a meal.

After months of research, she discovered a UPMC program and met physiologist Mark Jordan at rock bottom.

“I would come here and do maybe 5 or 7 minutes of exercise before I felt faint coming on and I would get back in my wheelchair and Mark would say, ‘OK, come back in two days and we’ll try again.’ .'”

“It’s all lying down exercises because people with POTS don’t feel good standing up, so we don’t do any standing exercises or use an upright bike. We’re going to use a rowing machine,” said Mark Jordan , senior clinical physiologist. at the UPMC Shadyside Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation Program.

Jordan works patients through the Levine Protocol, developed by Dallas cardiologist Dr. Benjamin Levine, and he says POTS patients report that it works.

“Over the last couple of years the volume has increased significantly. Initially we were seeing maybe two to three people a year taking POTS and now as it stands we have 20 or more enrolled in the program,” Jordan said.

With Jordan’s guidance, Vargo successfully used exercise to retrain his nervous system. Now she’s back on the treadmill and back to normal.

“At the end of the program, at the end of that year or so, I was running on the treadmill for 30 to 40 minutes at a time and I think one day I could have done 60 minutes on the treadmill and I said, ‘OK, I think I can go to the grocery store now and not be afraid of passing out.'”

UPMC also offers treatment for POTS at UPMC McKeesport and UPMC Passavant.