Sleep’s role in inflammatory disease processes
I now perform an interval assessment of this type not just in my patients with GER disease but across all my patients. I do so because sleep is physiologically important in so many ways.
In patients who have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and a variety of other liver diseases, we’re finding an increased association with sleep fragmentation outside of sleep apnea.
The same is true with irritable bowel and other functional diseases.
When you have sleep fragmentation in inflammatory bowel disease, you turn on a variety of inflammatory proteins (e.g., C-reactive protein) and cytokines, such as interleukins and tumor necrosis factor alpha. These processes may actually tip somebody over to a pro-inflammatory state.
When it comes to what might be considered a relatively simpler condition like GER disease, Ronnie Fass and colleagues showed a number of years ago via Bernstein testing performed in patients with both fragmented and normal sleep that the sensory thresholds all get lowered in the former group. This is irrespective of whether you have a functional symptom or you’re awakened by bumping your toe, a headache, or having heartburn; your sensory thresholds are lower. As a result, the same stimulus provides a higher sense of awareness. By ramping up that awareness, you increase the interference with the next-day function.
We’ve shown that sleep fragmentation affects a variety of things, including immune function. This may be why many people get sick when they travel in between time zones.
There are also implications relating to things like obesity. When you have sleep dysfunction, you have effects on leptin and ghrelin, contrary to what you would normally want to have. This, in turn, causes adverse effects on stimulation or suppression of satiety or appetite. These are things that I counsel my patients about when I talk about reflux as well as those trying to lose weight.
Sleep disruption affects cortisol stimulation and has a significant correlation with type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and even mortality statistics.
Advice for counseling patients
This latest analysis from the Nurses’ Health Study reminds us that a lot of people have reflux and a lot of people have sleep fragmentation. We need to do better in asking our patients if they have symptoms specific not only to reflux but also to potentially sleep-related complications.
The more we do that, the more we individualize patient treatment rather than treating them as a disease state. This, in turn, will allow us to practice personalized medicine. The more we can engage our patients with reflux disease by asking the right questions about next-day function, the better we can do in improving their outcomes.
It’s time for us all to open our eyes to the value of closing them. Let’s talk to our patients with reflux disease in a little bit of a different light, providing a new perspective on strategies we can use to mitigate and deal with those symptoms, thereby preventing the consequences of sleep fragmentation.
Hopefully, this overview gives you some guidance the next time you have a conversation with your patients. It will apply across many, many disease states, and in almost everything we do in gastroenterology.
David A. Johnson, MD, is professor of medicine and chief of gastroenterology at Eastern Virginia Medical School, Norfolk, Va., and a past president of the American College of Gastroenterology. He reported advising with ISOTHRIVE and Johnson & Johnson.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.