Have you tried Provent or Theravent? Please comment on your experiences.

I wonder how many of these teens have an untreated sleep-breathing disorder such as obstructive sleep apnea or upper airway resistance syndrome. It’s not too common to have teenagers’ fatigue explained by their poor sleep habits, hormonal changes, or just “being a teenager,” when in fact the source of their problem may be an undiagnosed sleep-related breathing disorder. For example, even a simple viral infection or allergy attack can enlarge lymphoid tissues in the throat, nose and tongue (palatine tonsils, adenoids and lingual tonsils), leading to more frequent partial to total obstructions and arousals. This can prevent quality deep sleep, leading to chronic, prolonged unrelenting fatigue. 

What you’ll see that that these teens will oftentimes prefer to sleep on their sides or stomachs, and have a parent that snores heavily (obstructive sleep apnea).

Do you have a teen that’s overly fatigued, no matter how long they sleep?

Please look in my Expert Interview archives for a full list of past programs.

One minor detail that’s important to remember is that when darkness stimulates brain neurons to produce melatonin, the signals goes through the cervical sympathetic ganglion, before reaching the pineal gland. A common side effect from any of the high blood pressure medications is that it lowers function of this ganglion, which is involved in the sympathetic nervous system. Blood pressure medications can lower activity of your sympathetic nervous system, which can in theory lower your melatonin levels.

So of you have high blood pressure, by taking blood pressure medications, you could be lowering your melatonin levels, which lead to poor sleep, which can result in weight gain, which can aggravate snoring and obstructive sleep apnea….and we know that obstructive sleep apnea can raise your sugar levels.

This example only shows that the human body can’t be reduced to one single molecule or chemical at a time. We need to look at multiple aspects of our physiology simultaneously.

In this teleseminar, I interview Dr. A. Joseph Borelli, who is President and Medical director of MRI at Belfair, in Bluffton, SC. He is a leading expert in brain imaging and has an interest in brain imaging in patients with obstructive sleep apnea. He’s going to show some eye-opening radiologic images of your brain after repeated apneas.

Please fill in your information below to access the free MP3 recording:

Staff writer for the New Yorker magazine Jane Kramer reviews a book by Bee Wilson, “Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook And Eat.” On the third page of the online version, there a section where the author describes the work of American anthropologist Charles Loring Brace, who specialized in the evolution of hominid teeth. He dates the onset of the modern Western overbite at around 250 years. Prior to this human incisors lined up edge to edge, like a guillotine. Then all of a sudden, human jaws, especially in the more civilized areas (who used forks and knives to cut meat into bite-sized pieces), started to develop an overbite. This change happened too quickly to be as a result of evolution. Here’s an excerpt from Kramer’s article:

By the late eighteenth century in Europe, people were slicing their food into bite-size morsels and carrying them to their mouths with forks—those formerly weird things, Wilson calls them. And they hardly needed to chew such tiny pieces, which in most cases were already softened by pounding, overcooking, or long, gentle braisings. At the same time, the modern overbite began to appear prominently in upper-class Western European jaws. Do not confuse this with the seriously inconvenient condition known to the world as buck teeth (without which we would have no orthodontists, and no mortified adolescents with mouthfuls of rubber bands and wire braces). Wilson’s modern overbite refers to “the way our top layer of incisors hangs over the bottom layer, like a lid on a box,” as she nicely puts it, and is “the ideal human occlusion” for the way we now eat. Why this happened and how long it took to happen is open to some debate, but it’s clear that until it happened most humans had the bite of other primates—“where the top incisors clash against the bottom ones, like a guillotine blade.”

Wilson’s favorite theory comes from the American physical anthropologist Charles Loring Brace, a specialist in the evolution of hominid teeth. In 1977, Brace published an article that put the age of the Western overbite at no more than two hundred and fifty years—which is to say that flatware and, with it, a significant change in how we chewed were all it took for the edge-to-edge occlusion that we inherited from the Neanderthals to be replaced by the bite we now call normal. Brace was haunted by overbites. He had long assumed them to be an incremental and selective evolutionary change that began with agriculture and the consumption of grains. But the jaws he studied, on his way to building a database on the evolution of hominid teeth—apparently the biggest in the world—changed his mind. The transformation he’d seen in those eighteenth-century-gentlemen jaws was too abrupt, and too radical, to qualify as evolution, especially given the rapidity with which it then followed the spread of flatware into the middle classes, in the nineteenth century. In 1914, in the run-up to war with Germany, a stainless-steel alloy—developed to prevent corrosion in gun barrels—went on sale in Sheffield, England. Once stainless appeared on the country’s dinner tables, the guillotine bite all but disappeared. 

There have been further significant milestones in how to eat our food, what foods we eat, as well as how we feed our children. If you think about the implications of how quickly modern humans’ jaws have changed just in the past few hundred years, it’s a frightening thought. As our faces get smaller and our brains get bigger, what will we look like in 2000 years? Here’s a thought.

What do you think about Kramer’s article?