Shortness of Breath

Many patients are just grateful to be able to walk!

One listed side effect of pred is breathlessness.

I think you may misunderstand PMR - it is a chronic condition and pred merely manages the symptoms, it does nothing to "cure" the disorder, an autoimmune problem which causes your immune system to attack your body tissues in error, not recognising them as "self" and this results in inflammation causing stiffness and pain. It burns out and goes into remission in anything from 2 to 6 years for 75% of patients - until that point you will require some pred to manage the symptoms. In that time the actual disease process is still chugging along in the background and leaves your muscles less able to cope with acute exercise than normal. 

Hi Paul I agree with Eileen, I thought after taking pred for about 10 days I thought I could go back to normal. Umfortunately I have had to reduce the exercises I did before PMR, I hate the sweats and the breathlessness but you have to adjust. However frustrating it maybe you need to listen to your body and don't overdo it. You can do more each day if you take it slowly. I want to be normal again but I have finally come to terms that it may not happen as quickly as I would like. The comfort for me is I am not alone and this forum is a good place to see how others are getting on with there journey, as Michdon says keep a smile on your face 😀

 

Paul,

      I am one my second battle with PMR. I do not know how you reduced from 20 mg to 4 in nine months but my experience indicates that from 20 - 5 in fairly easy and quick and from 5 - 0 is much more difficult. If your reduction was something like this:

                          Dose MG                  Days                     

                                   20                        30

                                   15                        30

                                   10                        30

                                     9                        30

                                     8                        30

                                     7                        30

                                     6                        30

                                     5                        30

                                     4                        30

My advise to you would be to stay at 4 mg for at least 60 days and then start reducing every 30 days by 1/2 mg.

If you reduce by 1/2 and the symptoms start to return go back up 1/2 for two weeks than start down again.From February 2017 until now I went from 60 mg to 5 mg. My body is signaling that 5 mg is the lowest amount to control the symptoms. I am not in any PMR pain but when I awake in the morning I am close to a flare and after taking 5mg I am fine again. Do not rush to zero. The good news is when PMR finally burned out ( 2 years 9 months)

and I stopped prednisone, the fatique, trouble breathing went away. At age 77 I won the Country Club Championship in golf.

 

Hi Paul,

In my experience aerobic exercise helps in PMR recovery, BUT it has to be at the "recovery" level - 60-75% of the max. Because of the restricted blood flow to your muscles, any type of interval training will put you  in anaerobic zone and you will be short of breath.  You can train gradually and increase your ability to exercise at the higher level, but it has to be over a long time. It took me more then a year to get back to the level of fitness where I was before PMR.  I don't know what will work for you, but what worked for me is steady, slow exercise most of the time (90%) and only for a very short time burst exercise (5min in an hour long session), done in the middle of the session, so you have time to recover after.

I have also noticed that regardless of how I exercise, it takes at least 10 minutes before the breathing catches up, so slow, gradual warmup is necessary.  Another observation is that every reduction in pred below 5mg is accompanied with temporary increase in fatigue and breathlessness.  It should go away in several weeks.

As someone already suggested, go slow and reduce only 0.5mg at the time, and spend more at each step. Pred only manages your symptoms, and if PMR underlying activity is not reduced, there is no point to reduce pred, and it can lead into symptoms flair-up  that would require higher dose of medication.

Lastly, I am not sure what position you play, but maybe if you talk to a coach and explain your condition, he can place you in defense position. That way you can still play and no lose all the training while recovering from PMR.

Thank you for all the responses. After I sent the post and reviewed others I felt guilty asking about fitness when some of you have pain and stiffness much worse than I do. I am just having a hard time  giving in.  This forum is heartwarming.