How the brain gets rid of its chemical waste through the glymphatics during sleep, via blood vessel oscillations, regulated by norepinephrine. Impeded by Ambien.
• Norepinephrine release from the locus coeruleus drives slow vasomotion in NREM sleep
• Infraslow norepinephrine oscillations control opposing changes in blood and CSF volumes
• Norepinephrine oscillation frequency during NREM sleep predicts glymphatic clearance
• The sleep aid zolpidem suppresses norepinephrine oscillations and glymphatic flow
Your favorite beverage may be doing serious damage to your health.
Sugar-sweetened beverages may increase your risk for heart disease and type 2 diabetes, new research finds.
Sugary drinks were found to be linked to over 330,000 deaths a year.
A study published in Nature Medicine analyzed global data on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) consumed around the world from both observational and randomized studies, as well as diabetes and cardiovascular disease prevalence.
On a global level, researchers found that 2.2 million new cases of type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million new cases of heart disease in 2020 were attributable to SSBs—representing about 1 in 10 new type 2 diabetes cases and 1 in 30 new heart disease cases.
Track sleep, heart rate, respiratory rate, temperature, blood oxygen, and sleep duration on your Apple Watch. Here’s how, from iPhone Insider (Dr Bob recommends signing up for lots of great tips and guidance on how to use your Apple Watch and iPhone 🤗
In the latest version of watchOS, the Apple Watch now has a dedicated Vitals app. The Vitals app collects your health data as you sleep and brings it all together in one convenient location. Let’s take a look at the new Apple Watch Vitals app.
Keep track of your health data in one convenient app.
Compare your current vitals with the previous week.
How To Use the Vitals App on Apple Watch
System Requirements
This tip works on Apple Watches running watchOS 11 or later. Find out how to update to the latest version of watchOS.
One of the best Apple Watch features is the ability to track your sleeping habits, like your average respiratory rate and heart rate. Now, the Vitals app provides you with a breakdown of your heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen level, and your sleep duration. All of this data is available in one convenient app. Here’s how to navigate the Vitals app on Apple Watch:
Open the Vitals app.
If this is your first time opening this app, you’ll be greeted by an explanation of the app. Scroll down and tap Next.
You’ll also be asked to enable notifications for this app. Tap Enable or Skip.
At the top, you’ll see an overall look at your Overnight Vitals. Tap the info icon for more details on what your vitals mean.
You can scroll down and select More Info.
This screen will tell you the difference between Typical and Outlier vitals. Tap the X to close this screen.
Scroll down to see individual breakdowns of each of your vitals. First, is Heart Rate. Like the Overnight Vitals, you can tap the info icon for more details on each Vital.
Scroll down to see your Respiratory Rate.
Next, is your Wrist Temperature.
Continue scrolling to see your Blood Oxygen level.
Lastly, you can see your Sleep Duration, which is how much sleep you got the night before.
You can tap the Calendar icon to toggle between Today’s Vitals and the past 7 days’ Vitals.
This will show you how your vitals last night compare to the previous 7 days.
That’s how to navigate the new Vitals app in watchOS 11. Each of these data points can be found in separate apps, like Heart Rate, Blood Oxygen, and Sleep, so it’s nice to have it all available at a quick glance. The Vitals app will learn you typical sleep behaviors and if there is ever an outlying bit of data, you’ll get a notification to help you improve your sleep.
Which foods should we point the finger at? Due to their saturated fat content, foods such as tropical oils (palm or coconut oil), baked goods, sweets and foods that have been fried all contribute to an increase of ‘bad’ cholesterol.
Processed meats – think sausages, bacon and hot dogs – also contain a high amount of saturated fat. According to one review involving 614,000 participants, each additional 50g (1.8oz) serving of processed meat per day is linked to a 42 per cent higher chance of heart disease.
Then there’s sugar. It also acts like a drug on your liver, encouraging it to produce more LDLs and fewer HDLs. A 15-year study found that participants who took in 25 per cent or more of their daily calories in sugar were more than twice as likely to die from heart disease, with cholesterol playing a key role.
“IF YOU TAKE a GLP-1 agonist like Ozempic or Zepbound, you can see changes to your waistline and your blood sugar within weeks. What might be less obvious is how the drug is affecting your brain. Research suggests these popular weight-loss medications can influence everything from daily behavior to risk of age-related memory loss, and neuroscientists are working overtime to discover exactly how these drugs affect the brain.
“It is a hot topic,” says Kevin Williams, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at the University of Texas Medical Branch. “If you can understand how these drugs are accessing the brain and where they are acting, then potentially that could guide future drug development to be able to better target these regions.”
Recently, the protective effects of sulforaphane on brain health were also considerably studied, where the studies have further extended to several neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, autism spectrum disorder, and schizophrenia.
Animal and cell studies that employ sulforaphane against memory impairment and AD-related pre-clinical biomarkers on amyloid-β, tau, inflammation, oxidative stress, and neurodegeneration are summarized, and plausible neuroprotective mechanisms of sulforaphane to help prevent AD are discussed.
The increase in pre-clinical evidences consistently suggests that sulforaphane has a multi-faceted neuroprotective effect on AD pathophysiology. The anti-AD-like evidence of sulforaphane seen in cells and animals indicates the need to pursue sulforaphane research for relevant biomarkers in AD pre-symptomatic populations.
A claim file is a collection of the information your insurer used to decide whether it would pay for your medical treatment or services. Most people in the U.S. facing a denial have the right to request their claim file from their insurer. It can include internal correspondence, recordings of phone calls, case notes, medical records and other relevant information.
Information in your claim file can be critical when appealing denials. Some patients told us they received case notes showing that their insurer’s decision was the outcome of cost-cutting programs. Others have gotten denials overturned by obtaining recordings of phone calls where company staff introduced errors into their cases.
In the first head-to-head test, Eli Lilly’s Zepbound obesity drug helped people lose significantly more weight than its main competitor, Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy.
People taking Zepbound lost 20.2% of their body weight on average after 72 weeks of treatment in the Lilly-sponsored study, compared with a 13.7% loss for Wegovy patients, Lilly said Wednesday.
That translated into an average 50-pound loss for people who took Zepbound, while Wegovy users lost 33 pounds.
PS: Zepbound and Mounjaro are the same drug with different brand names, as are Ozempic and Wegovy.
There is a wide variation in health care costs, whether it’s imaging, prescription costs or even routine care.
For example, an MRI scan of the lumbar spine (low back area) costs around $277 at our facility versus $767 at Bayhealth (that’s almost 3 times more!)
Take a look at Delaware’s ‘CostAware’ for more pricing information. You’ll be surprised at the differences (not unusual for hospital facilities to be 3 to 6 times more than outpatient centers!)
TL:DR 50% reduction in AHI (apnea-hypoxia index) and a lowering of blood pressure (which may reduce risk of stroke and heart attack!)
Obstructive sleep apnea is one of the most common respiratory disorders worldwide. Persons with obstructive sleep apnea can have loud snoring that is detrimental to social relationships and have breathing problems that result in recurrent nocturnal awakenings, unrefreshing sleep, and excessive daytime sleepiness — effects that together can substantially impair quality of life.
The improvement in systolic blood pressure that was seen with tirzepatide was substantially larger than effects seen with CPAP therapy alone7 and indicate that tirzepatide may be an attractive option for those patients who seek to reduce their cardiovascular risk
The initial results from the SURMOUNT-OSA trial show the usefulness of tirzepatide as an adjunctive treatment to address coexisting obesity in patients with obstructive sleep apnea. Weight loss resulting from tirzepatide treatment may be leveraged to expand the populations that may benefit from second-line treatments for obstructive sleep apnea.
CNMRI: Neurology, Sleep Medicine, MRI 