Recovery Michigan

My therapist wanted to explain a few things during our first online session:

“I'm going to check in with you at random times. If  you can't respond straight away, don't sweat it. Just come back to me when  you're ready. I'll check in daily.”

“Daily?” I asked.

“Yup! It shouldn't take longer than a couple minutes. Can you handle that?

“Yes, I can,” I answered.

There was a little more back-and-forth, all via Messenger, then this statement from my therapist:

“This might surprise you, but . . . I am a robot.”

It wasn't a surprise, of course. I'd downloaded “Woebot,” a chatbot recently created by researchers, and it was trying to establish our therapeutic relationship.

Treating obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) may lower the risk of seizures in patients with epilepsy, researchers reported here.

Somboon said few clinicians screen their epilepsy patients for this condition. "Neurologists don't often ask their epilepsy patients about sleep, but sleep affects everything," she told MedPage Today.

At the same time, "many people with epilepsy don't realize they have sleep apnea," she noted. "Being diagnosed is the first step towards getting effective treatment and potentially decreasing the risk of seizures."

The study results suggest that it's "important to screen every epilepsy patient [for OSA] with just a small, simple question: do you snore at night? Do you have apnea at night?" If the answer is yes, a neurologist can order polysomnography, and depending on the results and recommendations, can prescribe CPAP, she said.

’Tis is the Season to be Jolly.

Unless you’re one of the 25% of Americans diagnosed with a mental disorder — which is something like 85 million of us. If you’re one of those unfortunate souls, the Holidays have a way of dragging you into the sewer, like an ethereal version of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, who at least shows his victims the common courtesy of murdering them quickly and then eating their corpse. Not the Holidays, mind you. The Holidays prefers to make it slow. They lull us into a false sense of security with innocent carols and eggnog lattes, but they can still be just as dangerous to a depressed soul.

Also, let’s also do a quick shout-out to the unsung sufferers of mental illness. Sure, everyone knows about depression. It’s what all the movies make their characters when they want them to be all dark and brooding. But depression isn’t the only thing out there. A good old fashioned anxiety disorder can wreak just as much havoc.

Obsessive-Compulsive, Panic, Generalized Anxiety, Social Phobia, Post-Traumatic Stress — these are just a few of the various anxiety disorders that many of us deal with day in and day out. Don’t forget the Mood Disorders like Bipolar and the Psychotic Disorders like Schizoaffective or the dozen different types of Schizophrenia, or Somatoform Disorders or Personality Disorders, be they Cluster A or B or C. They all have their own special way of sowing chaos and discord.

Finally, roughly 10% of the population meets diagnostic criteria for a substance use disorder. The technical term for the thing killing 96 Americans every day is Severe Opioid Use Disorder, but let’s not forget the similar diagnoses that exist for alcohol, cannabis, stimulants, cocaine and sedatives. They each have their own way of killing you, too. Sorry, that last statement applies to cannabis, too. If you think it doesn’t, clearly you have never worked at a substance abuse clinic like I have.

The drug is called dronabinol, and it is based on a synthetic version of Delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) — the main psychoactive compound responsible for the "high" in cannabis use.

The randomized clinical trial is the longest and largest of its kind, and the results are from its second phase. Dronabinol is already in use for the treatment of nausea and vomiting in patients undergoing chemotherapy.

David W. Carley, a professor of biobehavioral health sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), jointly led the study with Dr. Phyllis Zee, professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and director of the Northwestern Medicine Sleep Disorders Center, both in Chicago, IL.

At least a mild form of sleep apnea is thought to affect 1 in 5 Americans, and treatment options are limited. Obstructive sleep apnea — the most prevalent form of the condition — is usually treated mechanically with a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) device. However, treatment adherence to this mechanical option is very poor.

Recurrent, untreated sleep apnea may lead to cardiovascular problems, such as heart disease and stroke. "There is a tremendous need for effective, new treatments [for] obstructive sleep apnea," says Prof. Carley, who is also the first author of the paper.

The drug tested in this trial — results of which are published in journal Sleep — works by targeting the brain. Dr. Zee explains, "The CPAP device targets the physical problem but not the cause."

"The drug targets the brain and nerves that regulate the upper airway muscles. It alters the neurotransmitters from the brain that communicate with the muscles."

"When people take a pill to treat apnea, they are treated for the entire night," adds Prof. Carley.

Those who took the highest dose, i.e., 10 milligrams of dronabinol, reported the highest satisfaction with the treatment. They showed decreased signs of subjective sleepiness and a lower incidence of apnea and hypopnea episodes.

Compared with full adherence to the mechanical CPAP device — which is rare — the new drug reduced apnea symptoms by 33 percent.

ushing off the subway platform, I race through the crowded streets to try to make lunch with my friend. I’ve canceled on her twice this week, something she isn’t exactly thrilled about. As I cross an intersection, my foot catches the curb and I tumble to the ground, my phone smashing into the busy street. Grabbing it quickly, my daily reminders flash through the cracked screen — wash dishes, clean room, buy tampons, email manager.

I groan, remembering that I was supposed to do all of these things before lunch. How could I forget, again?

The tasks would take my friend less than an hour to finish, but errands require an entire morning for me to complete. I start to panic, contemplating how I will squeeze them into my schedule now. Overwhelmed by the thought of having to sit down and socialize while feeling on edge, I call my friend to cancel. She digs into me for being inconsiderate. I head home, filled with shame, but instead of beginning my tasks, I push the clothes on my bed aside, turn off my phone, and crawl under the covers.

My inability to properly plan ahead and complete daily tasks has dwarfed my personal growth and well-being since I moved away from home seven years ago. I live in a constant state of disorder, expressed through missed appointments, forgotten text messages, and errands and assignments that take twice as long than my peers to complete. Even tidying the garbage littered across my apartment feels too overwhelming. My poor organizational and cleaning skills have fractured my relationships, prevented me from thriving in jobs, and in the process, destroyed my self-worth.

If you took the whole spectrum of human emotion and tried to map it, what would it look like? What geometrical shape would it take? Or would it be more like a schematic? How to accurately represent this crucial aspect of our inner world has been a topic of much debate among psychologists.

The nuances and interconnectedness of the human emotional landscape has proven difficult to represent visually. Two of the most common models, maps and semantic spaces—the framework used to represent word meanings—have both fallen flat. So recently, researchers at UC Berkeley attempted a new approach.

Though we by and large are all well-versed in human emotion, it’s a subjective experience. There are hundreds and even thousands of words related to emotional states. Also, finding the boundaries between one category and the next can be tricky. Researchers in this study call their model a “conceptual framework.”

When my friend Lily Stav Gildor and I realized we weren’t aware of any podcasts that specifically focus on discussing mental illness with people our age (18 – 35) we decided to take matters into our own hands.

We launched our podcast called Mental Health Hangouts, where we interview millennials about their experiences with mental health treatment, mental illness, addiction, etc.

Overall, the researchers found that participants who received the 140-milligram dose of erenumab experienced a 3.7-day reduction in the number of migraine days, while those who took the 70-milligram dose saw their number of migraine days fall by 3.2 days.

In comparison, subjects who received the placebo only saw a 1.8-day reduction in their number of migraine days over 6 months.

What is the AIP diet?

Also known as the paleo autoimmune protocol, the AIP diet is a much stricter version of the Paleo diet (which is based on meat, fish, vegetables, nuts and seeds).

It advises eliminating foods that may cause inflammation in the gut and eating nutrient-rich foods.

The AIP diet is based on a belief that autoimmune conditions are caused by something called a "leaky gut", which is medically now referred to as altered intestinal permeability.

The theory is that small holes in the gut cause food to leak into the body. This is thought to cause the immune system to overreact and start attacking bodily tissues in error.

A 2012 study suggested bacterial growth in the gut might be linked to inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.

This study in 2014 notes that the gut wall is maintained by networks of proteins. It explains that inflammation affects how well the gut wall functions. It also notes that food allergies can make the gut wall more porous.

The study concludes that problems with the gut wall are associated with autoimmune diseases. This goes some way to support the idea of the "leaky gut" proposed by supporters of the AIP diet.

A 2017 study found that eliminating certain foods as part of the AIP diet can improve symptoms of the autoimmune disease inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

This event is tomorrow (Saturday) at 1 pm EST.......

https://goo.gl/jVfzLJ

Introductory Tweets and Questions for Chat

Welcome to the #NoPityDisability chat with author @NPRjoeshapiro. Remember to use the hashtag when you tweet!

This chat is hosted by @meriahhudson on behalf of the Lit League (A Riveting Book Club with a Focus on Disability): https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheLitLeagueBookClub

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We will be talking about the book No Pity, it’s themes of the disability rights movement, the emergence of disability culture, rights and empowerment in this chat. Please note PwD=people w/ disabilities #NoPityDisability