Medical - Naturopathic Weight Loss

August 20, 2024 Naturopathic, Medical enhancedweightloss, naturopathic supplements, Semaglutide Tirzepatide, weightlossmedication

Tirzepatide in treating obstructive sleep apnea and obesity

Table of Contents Table Of Contents What is Sleep Apnea? Sleep Apnea In-depth Sleep Study Methods in the Study The Results Adverse Events Limitations Conclusion This is going to be a different type of blog post. Today we will discuss and summarize a recent paper published on June 21, 2024, in The New England Journal of Medicine exploring Tirzepatide for treating sleep apnea and obesity. Here we go! Approximately 39 million US adults have obstructive sleep apnea, and 936 million adults worldwide are estimated to have mild to severe obstructive sleep apnea. What is sleep apnea? Obstructive sleep apnea is a common condition where the airway gets blocked during sleep, causing breathing to stop and start repeatedly. One of the main risk factors for this condition is obesity. People who are overweight are more likely to have obstructive sleep apnea because the extra weight can put pressure on the airway and make it more likely to collapse during sleep. Hence it was no surprise, that there is a press release about a study that looked at how Tirzepatide affects sleep apnea. Sleep apnea in-depth Before we get to the findings, let’s learn more about sleep apnea. There are two types of sleep apnea. The first type is obstructive sleep apnea, which happens when the upper airway gets blocked during sleep. This blockage interferes with breathing and can cause a person to stop breathing for short periods while asleep. The second type is central sleep apnea. This occurs when the brain doesn’t send the right signals to the muscles that control breathing. As a result, the muscles and nerves aren’t activated enough for breathing, leading to pauses in airflow during sleep. The reason we care about sleep apnea is because, if left untreated, it can lead to many serious health problems. These include insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol levels, high blood sugar, stroke, kidney disease, sexual dysfunction, and coronary artery diseases like heart failure. Essentially, untreated sleep apnea can cause a wide range of medical issues. Additionally, several health conditions can increase the risk of developing sleep apnea, such as hypothyroidism, cleft lip or cleft palate, heart disease, kidney disease, large tonsils, obesity or higher body weight, and even menopause. These conditions can either cause sleep apnea or make it worse. Now, how do you know if you have sleep apnea? Some of the most common symptoms include excessive daytime sleepiness, where you go to sleep, wake up, and still feel unrested. You might also experience loud snoring. Another symptom is observed episodes where you stop breathing while sleeping. You might suddenly start breathing again with a gasp, or someone may need to nudge you awake to resume breathing. People with sleep apnea might also wake up gasping or coughing. Additionally, some wake up with a dry mouth or sore throat in the morning. Morning headaches are also a common symptom. Sometimes, difficulty controlling blood pressure can be an indicator of sleep apnea. If you have any of these symptoms, it might be worth consulting a healthcare professional to get evaluated for sleep apnea. Sleep study If you think you might have sleep apnea and want to get diagnosed, the first step is to undergo a sleep study. There are several types of sleep studies available. The most common one is done at a sleep clinic, where you stay overnight. During this study, called polysomnography, they place leads on your head to monitor brain activity, and sensors on your chest to check your heart and breathing. They also measure your oxygen levels while you sleep. Another option is a home sleep test, which you can do in your bed. This test doesn’t use as many sensors. Typically, you’ll wear a device like a watch, have a band around your chest, a sensor in your nose to monitor airflow, and a pulse oximeter on your finger to check oxygen levels. This home test is more convenient and often less expensive than the in-clinic study, depending on your insurance. Both types of tests provide valuable information to help diagnose sleep apnea. As we know, Tirzepatide is a once-weekly GIP and GLP-1 receptor agonist known to lead to a 20% reduction in body weight. If you are familiar with Semaglutide, you can think of Tirzepatide as its younger stronger brother. Methods in the study It is an industry-funded study, it was conducted in two phase 3, double-blind, randomized, controlled trials involving adults with moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea and obesity. The participants were assigned to receive either the maximum tolerated dose of Tirzepatide (10 mg or 15 mg) or a placebo for 52 weeks. In terms of the most salient exclusion criteria, type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, a prior or planned surgery, or if they had a self-reported weight loss of more than 5kg in the past 3 months. The intervention was Tirzepatide, which started at a dose of approximately 2 and a half mg once a week and up to 15 mg once a week and to a comparison of placebo. The outcome was change from the baseline in the Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI). In brief, the AHI index is essentially how many times a person stops breathing every hour, it’s assessed with a sleep study. So, all the participants in this study had a sleep study done at the beginning and a follow-up sleep study at the end of the trial. The Results Now, let’s dive into the actual results! They recruited 470 adults, and as noted they were randomized to Tirzepatide or placebo. The average age was 50. 30% were women and 73% were white, the average BMI was 39 and the base AHI index was 50 as a point of reference “AHI above 30 is severe” In other words, this was the real deal in terms of sleep apnea. So, what happened? Well, in the group of Tirzepatide, those patients experienced a 25%-point reduction in their AHI index which is remarkable compared to the placebo

August 7, 2024 Naturopathic, Medical

3 Steps to a Mental Health Plan

Table of Contents Table Of Content Suppressed trauma The roadmap The 3 steps to healing Conclusion Many of us think going out into the world and chasing success will somehow heal us from all the shame or trauma we experienced. This does not always work. This usually leads us to drive ourselves with perfectionism and an overdone type-A personality. It makes us almost feel like we cannot do enough, and everything must be a certain way. Instead of compassion and self-love, we become too indulged in stressing to make the right choices. All this post-trauma affects us so powerfully in our day-to-day lives. Do you feel as if you are kept in a small life where you are not moving forward? This post may not have the keys to remove your trauma, it is ONLY YOU who has the answers inside of you; you just have not accessed them yet. And this is what we’re going to do 🙂! Suppressed trauma The idea is about when we go through trauma and when we don’t process what happened to us, and we don’t deal with the emotional energy we have surrounding it, we suppress it, compartmentalize it, and think, “Oh, if I ignore it, it’ll go away.” Remember! Emotions are energy and so they don’t go away. If you stuff them down, that’s where they stay! So, when you experience trauma and you don’t deal with the emotion surrounding it, it stays in your BODY, and it creates these stories for you. Your brain creates stories around your trauma because your brain wants to keep you safe. Your brain shifts into survival mode. In other words, when you have suppressed unprocessed emotional energy, your brain may still think you’re in some kind of danger and so it writes these limiting stories for you about your shame, your unworthiness, who you can’t be in the world, and what you shouldn’t say or do. This makes us afraid to follow or rundown our dreams. So many times, people who experience trauma begin to live in a gray-skied mental landscape. It is living inside a repeatedly recounted story that you believe about yourself. No one wanted me. I would never be good enough. I could never be happy. It is certainly okay to feel overwhelmed and scared when you start unfolding your trauma. The beginning can bring even more confusion. You don’t know what to do, where to go, what to read, or what makes sense. The roadmap Why go all in to let go? Did you know you can let go of past trauma and that your body already knows how? Going into our body is very important because the trauma is stored in our tissues. We need to learn how our body specifically releases trauma, so “go all in” can mean so many things in these areas, it can be letting go of the negative beliefs in our minds, and it can also be letting go of things that happen in our body. Basically, going all in and letting go are connected and are interconnected in many ways!! The 3 steps to healing The three-step process to heal trauma is inspired by Cami Birdnon (Trauma Trained Embodiment Coach). As you start going in your body and begin learning tools, you will recognize differences, where trauma is released. This is what the 3 steps process is all about. The 3 steps process is about being able to understand how your body talks to you. The approach is centered around TOP DOWN, BOTTOM UP & SIDEWAYS of your body. This is an understanding of when your top-down is talking to you, when your bottom-up is talking to you, and when things are coming from the side which is the sideways process. The Top-down processing is all about awareness. Going on in your mind and using that awareness to pay attention to what’s going on in your body. It is also a mindset tool. You are being the watcher, the noticer of what is going on in your body. Trauma is not always visible, and this is why we have the top-down concept. The approach: you have something going on in your body. You find yourself doing certain things repeatedly, why? When you ask yourself questions, you may find; oh, so it’s because am thinking this way about it and then that might link to a trauma belief. It’s AWARENESS and that is what we need to achieve mental well-being. Top-down processing is a nice space to use for journaling. You start to have tangible evidence and understanding of what is going on cognitively with the trauma happening in your body. Not only knowing what is happening in your body but also begin understanding what is normal in trauma 🙂 This bottom-up processing is when you have something that seems to be uncontrolled. This is when triggers happen that you can’t control, and suddenly you feel like you need to curl up in a ball and hide, or when you have all that anxiety and want to fight to be free from something. This is when you want to use some tools to offer safety to your body, once you recognize what you are feeling from the top-down processing. A well-known tool used in trauma healing is the (butterfly hug). The idea is that the butterfly hug teaches our body how it can be our container safety. In other words, this makes us connect to ourselves and learn to trust our bodies instead of trying to get out of our bodies which is often felt in trauma. In the previous two processes, we discussed how to raise questions about our thoughts, and from there we learned tools to handle uncontrolled anxiety, the tools to offer safety to your body. This leads us to the third and last process the sideways processing. Process 3 deals with recognizing where the thoughts are coming from and what the energy coming from the thoughts. Sideways enable us to

Category: Medical

Tirzepatide in treating obstructive sleep apnea and obesity

3 Steps to a Mental Health Plan