Mere,

I have suffered severe autonomic dysfunction for years. One thing that caught my mind in your last post was the chest pain. I'll assume the did a routine work up for that?

My thought is whether you could be having cardiac spasms (vasospasms). These are actually an autonomic dysfunction caused by spasm of any one of the arteries around the heart. I have these frequently and truly understand how they feel just like a heart attack. nitro is my best friend!! In a sense they are like a short lasting heart attack as the artery can momentarily collapse during spasms, thus giving you that crushing chest pain and other symptoms.

They can be extremely difficult to diagnose because they are hard to catch in the act by echo or heart cath (and the cath itself can cause one so not the best diagnostic tool either). Diagnosis is usually more clinical according to my cardio at Johns Hopkins. I do have some indicators with significant heart wall dysfunction during stress echo, so between that, clinical, other autonomic dysfunction, and ruling others things out, we've come to this conclusion.

I'm certainly no doctor, but if you are having other autonomic problems, then maybe the chest pain is related to autonomic vasospasms.