Narcolepsy: The Life Essential 8 Connection

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Dr. Surkin: 
Hello, this is Dr. Lee Surkin. I'm a board-certified Cardiologist and Sleep Physician and founder of the American Academy of Cardiovascular Sleep Medicine. This episode will focus on Life’s Essential 8 Diet Paradigm and a Connection with Narcolepsy.

We know that sodium plays a significant role in cardiovascular health. Multiple studies have shown that high sodium intake is associated with increased blood pressure in children and adults, and it may have direct effect on adverse cardiovascular health outcomes, such as the incidence of stroke and heart disease. Reducing sodium intake has been shown in studies to decrease both systolic and diastolic blood pressure; thereby reducing long-term cardiovascular risk.

It's also very important to consider high sodium intake in children based on an NHANES study of over 6,000 participants. Higher intake of sodium has been shown to be associated with a higher blood pressure overall and is more significantly higher in individuals in this study who are overweight and obese. It's very important to follow these patients throughout their entire lifecycle from youth all the way through to elderly ages with a focus on cardiovascular disease prevention.

The CARDIA-SSBP trial is a recently published trial that looked at 213 individuals aged 50 to 75, both with and without hypertension. They were placed on a usual diet, a high sodium diet, as well as a low sodium diet, as listed. And the results showed that 73.4% of studied patients in this population had a reduction in their systolic blood pressure by 4 mmHg with a range up to 8 mmHg. Diabetics had a more profound reduction in systolic blood pressure by 17 mmHg. And this is critically important because we know that hypertension affects 1.3 billion people worldwide and is a major cardiovascular risk factor.

The FDA’s position on sodium basically emphasizes the importance of reducing sodium intake as a measure to improve long-term cardiovascular risk.

Focusing on narcolepsy, as stated earlier, sodium intake matters for everyone. And it's important to know that high sodium-containing drugs which do offer symptomatic treatment for narcoleptic patients may potentially increase blood pressure over the course of time and, in so doing, would potentially increase long term cardiovascular risk. It's very important that we need to counsel our patients on dietary modifications in general, and particularly when being prescribed higher-sodium pharmacotherapy medications. There is now an available lower-sodium medication to treat narcolepsy, which is certainly worthwhile considering in our patient population.

Thank you very much for viewing this episode.

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