The Brain Literally Starts Eating Itself When It Doesn’t Get Enough Sleep? Na…Yeah!! 😢
Its never been a secret that one needs a good night’s sleep, and thankfully, the community and health practitioners are becoming increasingly aware of the impact on general and systemic health if the body is robbed of sufficient sleep.
Last year I received a ‘Fitbit’ for my birthday, and am loving it for the sleep checking app. (The step counter can be depressive, to say the least!)
Mine tracks the sleep cycles an obvious area of interest to me and is proving to be a fairly reliable indication of my sleep experience. Likewise, many of my patients and clients happened to also receive one as a Christmas gift and it is a lovely segway into the topic of sleep when they present to the clinic. (Not used as a clinical aid.)
As an orofacial myologist and oral health therapist, one of the critical components of any evaluation is my client’s sleep pattern. Before the parent/patient even provides the answer it’s not unusual that I already have a pretty good idea of what the answers might be. Sometimes a parent brings their young child for their first dental checkup (in my oral health therapist capacity) and we end up spending significantly more time discussing sleep and airway issues than anything else! Those same parents often have ‘light bulb’ moments and are astounded at what they thought was reasonably ‘normal’ for their child, was, in fact, abnormal and damaging to their child. I have a wonderful team of specialists who I refer or report to on a (very) regular basis and together we play a part in moving children and adults towards optimising their health potential.
There is a myriad of reasons that sleep is disturbed, and determining the answer is often fabricated in the understanding of the interplay of physical, social and psychological contributions.
The article below was written in such a way that the general public can grasp the concept of the importance of sleep to the brain. It’s written from the perspective of effects on brain function in adults (and its where I got my headline from), but if you apply those same principals to a child’s developing brain, it explains my passion and persistence in this aspect of health care!
So if you have concerns for anyone after reading this, seeking help and advice is the first step.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-brain-starts-eating-itself-when-it-doesn-t-get-enough-sleep#
