If You Have Pulmonary Fibrosis, You Need QUALITY SLEEP!

B'SD

27 Tamuz 5768

Pulmonary Fibrosis is a lung-scarring disease that perplexes medical professionals trying to treat it. The cause for PF is not known.

Today's post is for alerting you to the fact that PF causes serious breathing problems for people with this condition. They're starving for a full breath. That often ruins their deepest sleep, called REM.

REM, Rapid Eye Movement is the part of the sleep process that recharges our batteries so we can face the next day and its demands. But people with Pulmonary Fibrosis often waken at this critical time. The loss of REM sleep worsens their situation. It causes fatigue in people already struggling to breathe.



Dr. Sonya Danoff an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine wrote about the problem in Chest, a medical professional's journal. She said: "Physicians should strongly consider monitoring people with this scarring lung disease for sleep disorders as part of their standard care, because poor sleep has a profound effect on their quality of life... Essentially, the body's internal alarms go off as people enter the most rejuvenating part of sleep. And when people don't get a good night's sleep, they cannot function normally the next day. It's a slippery slope that gets progressively worse over time... Because there is so much about pulmonary fibrosis that we cannot yet fix, we need to focus on what we can fix while we wait for research to catch up with treatments that can prevent or reverse the disease."

The latest study results back up previous research by Danoff and other sleep experts at Johns Hopkins: 18 of 22 people with fibrosed lungs had problems breathing while asleep. They kept waking up in a struggle to breathe. The majority of them dropped out of R.E.M. sleep during the night, losing 25 percent of total R.E.M. sleep time. That means they dreamt less and they couldn't build energy they'd desperately need for the next day.

You know how awful you feel and function and after one bad night of poor sleep. Imagine what could happen to you over long periods of time without sufficient sleep.

If you have PF, this is a life-threatening problem.

Want more information on Pulmonary Fibrosis? See: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/pulmonary/clinics/interstitial_lung_disease.html



Read my book to learn some excellent relaxation techniques. Work with your doctor if you have PF, focusing together on getting better sleep. It can prolong your life and vastly improve the QUALITY of YOUR LIFE.

Wishing you pleasant dreams and a stronger constitution,

Yocheved Golani
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