Dr. Michael J. Zachek Discusses Sleep Medicine

Watch to see Graves Gilbert Clinic's Dr. Michael J. Zachek discuss Sleep Medicine and the problems people have with sleep today! To schedule your appointment with Dr. Zachek, please call 270-783-3323.

Full Transcript:
"Hi, I'm Doctor Mike Zachek, I'm a pulmonologist, critical care specialist, and sleep specialist.

We're going to be talking about some of the problems today that people have with sleep and one of the most important problems is we're not getting enough sleep.

You know, when people when to bed at ten o'clock at night and they got out of bed at six in the morning, they got eight hours of sleep and people typically felt very well rested. We don't do that so much anymore.

Unfortunately in this 24/7 world that we live in, we stay up late, we get up early, we try and get as much done as possible and we wind up not getting nearly the amount of sleep that we need. That can really complicate our lives in a lot of different ways. We aren't as careful about what we do. Perhaps we don't concentrate as well as we should. A lot of times people will experience medical problems simply because they don't get enough sleep.

What I do in this medicine world with sleep medicine is to find out if people have problems other than just not getting enough sleep. One of those is a common problem called obstructive sleep apnea. Obstructive sleep apnea is simply, I snore and at times I stop breathing or my breathing interrupts my sleep. It sort of sounds like this.

(Snoring noises)

And then there's a brief pause, perhaps five or ten seconds and then.

(Snoring noises)

And the process starts over again. Now, that's of course not normal and when people have sleep apnea it wakes them up very briefly and the brain wakes you up to breathe.

When we're in the sleep center the typical complaints people have are I'm either too sleepy or I can't sleep properly.

So too sleepy means to me look for certain medical problems that are associated with either poor sleep quality making someone not sleep well at night and therefore being sleepy during the day. The flip of that is the person that says you know I lay down to try and go to bed and I can't get to sleep, when I do fall asleep I wake up constantly, I feel like I'm never rested, I have insomnia.

Now that's a rather important problem because insomnia affects up to 1/3 of people during our lives. Well we use things called cognitive behavioral therapies to help people to sleep better on their own. You always have it with you because it's in your brain, you've learned how to do these tricks and it really helps people to sleep better.

When we see people in the sleep center we evaluate them with what we know as polysomnogram or what would be in lay terms a sleep test. Now sleep tests are very helpful for ferreting out problems like sleep apnea, finding out if leg movements are causing sleep disruption, and sometimes evaluating people who are extra sleepy.

There's a second test we do we call the multiple sleep latency test and it always follows the night time sleep test and in that multiple sleep latency test or "MSLT" what we're giving people are opportunities to nap. What are we measuring? We actually put a stopwatch on how quickly people fall asleep and we want to know if they go into dream sleep.

Now often in the sleep center anymore we're doing a lot of home testing. Home testing of course is less expensive, I tell patients it's not as accurate, it's sort of like getting an x-ray instead of an MRI, but you get a lot of information from an x-ray and if you break your leg, let's get the x-ray and put the cast on, we don't have to fool with the more expensive test.

I would say that between 60-70% of our patients are now receiving home tests and if they prove that there's a sleep breathing problem, we'll go ahead and issue the home test, we'll see the patient the next day while the patient is waiting, we'll evaluate the test, I’ll give them the answer and begin therapy right that same day."

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