Resting Heart Rate - A Possible Correlation?
For this and anything else I blog on the subject of prostate cancer, I first have to divulge that I am not medically proficient, am not a scientific person, and nothing that I say can be verified by professionals. Anyone with suspicions about their own prostate cancer or their own rise in their resting heart rate should contact proper medical advice and anyone of a certain age (varies country to country) should have their prostate specific androgen (PSA) tested at least annually.
The purpose of this blog post is to outline the changes in my personal resting heart rate before and during the time when the cancer took over and during treatment. I should point out at this point that my oncologist told me that my rapid increase in resting heart rate was maybe due to a massive flare-up of the cancer at that time and the cancer would have taken hold a long time before the rise started.
I have also contacted various cancer researching charities, none of which were interested in my data.
So, to start off at the beginning, why do I know my resting heart rate. In this time of digital watches, be they Apple watches, Garmin watches or, as in my case, a Fitbit Versa 4, those that own these devices are shown their resting pulse on waking each day. Because at one time I ran full marathons, then later in life only half marathons, this information was important to me as an indicator of general health and my fitness levels. Obviously, your resting pulse varies from day to day so mine was logged daily, or at the end of each week going through my Fitbit app’s history, and a seven-day average was then logged on a graph which is shown at the end of this blog.
With a fifty-two-week moving average (the red line) of around sixty-nine or seventy for the weekly average of my resting pulse, I was quite happy for a male approaching their seventies and put things down to staying relatively fit by walking, having given up running. Average resting pulse then started climbing slowly from 14th August 2022 as a starting point of 70.43 and kept climbing through 2023 and into 2024 when, on the 7th January 2024 it had reached a high of 86.29.
I guess that if I’d been sensible, at that point I would have consulted my GP. Being not sensible and looking for reasons / excuses for the rise, I put it down to the fact that my resting pulse started rising at the time when my daughter’s husband walked out on his family and then the added pressures that we faced as a family, filling in for his absence. Remember, as stated earlier, my oncologist told me that at the point of the rise the cancer would have already been there and the rise on the graph was possibly it flaring up.
On the week ending 31st March 2024, my weekly average resting pulse was 84 and that was the week when my urologist placed into the skin of my belly a drug that would last for a month and was designed to stop the production of testosterone in my body, because testosterone is the food that prostate cancer lives on. The first dose of Firmagon was a double dose and it had the effect of lowering my weekly average resting pulse from eighty-four to seventy-four over two weeks, an incredible drop, and also by 27th June 2024 my PSA level had dropped from 4,777 down to 28. A single dose of Firmagon went into my belly fat, in April, May, and June, until on 19th July 2024 it was changed to Prostap which is now administered (needle in belly fat again) only every three months.
On 30th June 2024 my average weekly resting pulse was seventy-two and that is when my oncologist placed me onto a daily dose of Apalutamide (four tablets a day) which caused another drop in weekly average resting pulse down to sixty-five, the lowest it has probably been for many a year and also that corresponded with a drop in PSA levels from 28 down to 4.4 by 28th August 2024. The desired effect here is to double the attack on the cancer. The injections stop or slow down the production of testosterone, the tablets attack and destroy any testosterone that is already in the body so already feeding the cancer.
By 4th November 2024 my PSA was down to 1.1 then down to 0.5 by 17th Jan 2025 and the latest figure, at 15th April 2025, down to 0.3, an incredible drop from 4,777.
As stated above, nobody seems to be interested in what I believe is a correlation between rapidly increasing resting heart rate and an increase in PSA. Should anyone in this field of medicine want any of my data then please shout and I will gladly supply anything needed.
