Go to Sleep! to fight heart disease - Part 1

CPR for Life

Sleep expert, Dr. Imran Shaikh of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, pulls back the covers on how sleep affects your heart health.

(*Unfortunately, there is the sound of a creaky chair and some other background noise in this episode; sorry about that! I like to imagine it as a purring cat :-)

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Dr. Sagar: The time when you lay your head down on your pillow may feel like downtime. But for your brain and body, it's just a different kind of go-time. How do you know if your sleep is good enough to protect your heart and how can you get it better?

Dr. Sagar: I'm lucky to be joined today with Dr. M Ron shake. He's a sleep medicine and obesity medicine specialist, as well as an internal medicine physician. He works in both hospital and primary care in Illinois. He did his training at SLU or the St. Louis university. And a sleep fellowship at rush university in Chicago.

He's currently an active member of the American academy of sleep medicine, particularly in public awareness.

Welcome to the show. Thank you for being here.

Dr. Shaikh: Well, thank you so much for having me.

so many problems with sleep, so many problems with weight that just leads to so many other problems. So, Happy to discuss more with you today.

Dr. Sagar: Yeah, so right as we get in, just one question I like to ask people is, what is your definition of health?

Dr. Shaikh: So I'd like to think of health as a big component of multiple things, but the main components I think are your physical health, your mental health, your social wellbeing, and your sleep. So those are a lot of the topics that I tend to pick on a lot and try and review as much as how are you doing physically, what are you eating?

What are you drinking? Are you exercising? How's your mood? Are you in a good mental state? How are you in society? Do you have a job? Are you connected with your community? And then sleep, which a lot of people don't pay enough attention to, but is essentially one of the biggest pillars of a good, healthy lifestyle.

Dr. Sagar: Yeah, foundational.

Dr. Shaikh: it is very foundational. Yeah,

Dr. Sagar: Oh, so let's start right there. What is sleep? Is it the same thing as a coma?

Dr. Shaikh: No, not the same thing as a coma, but sleep is essential. It is what we use to keep ourself healthy and functioning. It allows your body basically the ability to repair, restore, re-energize. It helps us reset and really helps us balance a lot of things in our body, including, like our hunger and appetite.

It helps us improve concentration, productivity. Productivity reduces issues in mental health. Helps relieve like stress and anxiety and it even improves our immune system. So it's really a very, very critical part of time in our day-to-day life that really allows us to reenergize again.

Dr. Sagar: It sounds like you are passionate about it, which is fantastic. How did you actually find that passion for sleep medicine while you were in internal medicine? How did you choose to get into that particular field?

Dr. Shaikh: So it's interesting, I definitely, from the get go, didn't wanna do sleep medicine initially. I didn't even know anything about it. Honestly, you don't really get too much exposure to it in training, I actually initially wanted to do cardiology. I wanted to be a cardiologist. But then the more time I spent in my training, I realized that I didn't want to be the person who had to step in when something severely bad was already happening.

I wanted to be more of that person who's helping you prevent that from happening. And I think that's one of the biggest shifts in medicine nowadays, is that we're really trying to take more of a preventative approach rather than a reactive approach.

I did an elective in my training and I just loved it at that point. And I realized how related it is to so many other medical problems.

Really, every other organ, every other body system is somehow affected by sleep.

There's just such a correlation between sleep and obesity that they really went hand in hand. And that's kind of how I ended up getting into both of those.

Dr. Sagar: trying to complete the picture to help people the most with their prevention.

Dr. Shaikh: Exactly, exactly.

Dr. Sagar: so what does sleep have to do specifically with cardiovascular disease? Heart and blood vessel disease. I.

Dr. Shaikh: So multiple things, it is, there are multiple different sleep disorders, so you kinda have to break it down a little bit. But in general, poor sleep quality and , poor sleep duration has been linked to quite a few cardiometabolic risk factors. Most commonly things like high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, coronary artery disease where you're having artery buildup and there is a high rate of death among patients with heart disease who are having sleep problems as well too.

Dr. Sagar: What do you mean by that? The higher people with heart disease, if they start sleeping worse, they end up dying more or...