Narcolepsy: The Life Essential 8 Connection

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Dr. Surkin: 
Hello everybody, this is Dr. Lee Surkin. I am a board-certified Cardiologist and board-certified Sleep Physician, welcoming you to this episode discussing Life's Essential 8: Healthy Sleep with a Focus on Narcolepsy.

Life's Essential 8 evolved from Life's Simple 7, which included healthy diet, healthy weight, healthy levels of blood pressure, blood lipids, blood glucose, physical activity, and avoidance of nicotine. The understanding of the importance of sleep led to Life's Essential 8.

So, we know that ideal cardiovascular health in the population is very low in the United States. And there is a greater degree of importance on identifying people at younger ages so that a greater impact on preventive efforts can be successful. Narcolepsy is a disorder that typically its onset is in younger years as well. Diet across the United States is negligible in multiple age groups. And there are multiple differences in cardiovascular health across different races and ethnicities. And it really bears a great deal of importance to focus on these 8 preventive metrics in order to reduce the long-term cardiovascular risk.

So, sleep health is a new component of cardiovascular health. Sleep health is complicated. It's a multidimensional construct with overlapping components that really deal with duration, timing, regularity of sleep, sleep efficiency, how long you're asleep when you're in bed, sleep satisfaction, and impact on alertness during waking hours, which obviously can, you know, affect your performance during the day and potentially increased risk of accidents.

Significant research has been focused on sleep duration, which ultimately led to the American Heart Association adding sleep, and converting it to Life's Essential 8. So, Life's Essential 8 having added sleep health as a new component of cardiovascular health really focuses in the article on sleep duration. But as we know, having spoken about this earlier, sleep quality, sleep health is a multifaceted construct. So, in studies that deal specifically with sleep duration, there has been fairly consistent agreement that getting less than 6 hours of total sleep, or greater than 9 hours of total sleep can both increase the long-term cardiovascular risk. So, insufficient sleep duration clearly has been shown to increase cardiovascular disease, major adverse cerebrovascular and cardiovascular events, and even mortality.

From a sleep quality standpoint, this is also associated with an increased risk of coronary artery disease. And any aspect that results in disrupted nighttime sleep has also been shown to increase the risk of mortality related to cardiovascular disease.

So, healthy sleep and the narcolepsy connection. We know that preclinical models or laboratory models show that a deficiency of hypocretin, which characterizes narcolepsy, is linked and associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular dysregulation, excessive daytime sleepiness, and disrupted nighttime sleep, which are both hallmark features of narcolepsy, are also shown to be risk factors for coronary artery disease, cardiovascular disease. And disrupted nocturnal sleep increases mortality risk from cardiovascular disease borne out by studies.

So, thank you very much for listening to this review on Life's Essential 8 and cardiovascular health with a focus on narcolepsy.

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