Dr. Jairo Barrantes joins Ryan to talk about Academic Sleep Medicine including what he loves about it, what call looks like, and why he chose academia.
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Jairo's interest in sleep medicine sparked during his pulmonary critical care fellowship, where their director was the head of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. That being said, a pulmonary physician has too little exposure to what sleep medicine really is including the different diseases you come across. Sleep medicine involves 80%-90% of sleep apnea. While the training you get as a pulmonologist is the sleep apnea part and not so much exposure to all other diseases that sleep medicine entails. This opened up different doors such as narcolepsy, parasomnia, and insomnia, which may up the main problems of sleep medicine today– but there are more others apparently, especially in children. Jairo describes sleep medicine as a very fine specialty where you get the opportunity to see all patients.
Jairo says that most people choose this specialty for being gentle in terms of not having any calls and you only get to work from Monday to Friday. You infrequently get phone calls from the sleep lab at night time. So many people choose this because of the lifestyle. However, what makes you a good physician is to have a good understanding of the pulmonary and brain physiology. We sleep 33% of our life so we sleep for many years. And that's part of the time that no one really cares about. That period of time, a lot of changes happen during our sleep. Metabolism slows down as well as your brain function and this has that recovery and immunology component.
Jairo explains that the reason many people die during their sleep is due to surges of stress once your metabolism goes down and when your body is already deconditioned, this can cause a heart attack.
You may choose to do only adults or only pediatrics, or both as what Jairo does. For the children, the most common concern would be sleeping difficulties. Childhood insomnia composes 80% of his consults. The rest would be children with sleep apnea. Interestingly, sleep apnea in children is often misdiagnosed as ADHD by primary care physicians and pediatricians and they prescribe the medication like stimulants to keep them awake and focused during the day. But the reality is that these kids are sleep-deprived and have got poor quality of sleep. That could be sleep apnea that hasn't been treated for years and have been in medication to keep them awake. Suddenly, you go ahead to treat the sleep apnea and the kid's behavior improves. In fact, about 40% of children that have been diagnosed with ADHD were actually suffering sleep apnea. The rest of the patients would then be dealing with parasomnias, which are irregular behaviors during sleep time such as banging of the head or entire body during sleep.
Obesity and narrow airways may cause sleep apnea and this is easier to notice among adults. However, there are other multiple solutions for this such as medication to help them sleep. Jairo also likes to use common devices like fitness trackers to help patients with insomnia so they can develop better sleep patterns. The key is to sleep right at the wrong time. For instance, teens go to sleep at around 1-2 am and wake up at 11 am. People think they're lazy, but they just have a different sleep pattern. Unfortunately, this is causing disrupting in schools. In fact, in Minnesota, people are having their children start school later at 9am-10am and they scored better in their standardized test because they perform better when not sleep-deprived.
Some people with parasomnia