| Common Sleep Disturbance #2: Low Progesterone Levels |
11.30.11 12:00:00 |
Transcript of video:
Hi. I’m Dr. Christopher Mote, and today is another ARK Clinical Pearl.
We’re gonna talk about one of the most common things that happens to a person with HPA axis dysfunction, and it’s sleep disturbance, or insomnia. And by far, the second most common reason for these sleep disturbances is a person who has low progesterone. You’ll see your test result come back and when a male has less than 50 picograms per deciliter, and when the female test results come back at less than 100, then you can usually correlate that with patients who have a racing mind, that can’t shut off their thoughts. They lay their head on the pillow and they can’t go to sleep. There’s anxiety. There’s panic.
And what’s happening in these patients is that their progesterone level, which should be facilitating the release of GABA and the relaxation of the mind, is too low to facilitate those neurons and that neuronal release. So these patients can’t sleep unless we can augment their own progesterone levels with some exogenous progesterone.
If you were going to go to a compounding pharmacy, you might use between 15 and 25 milligrams of a sublingual progesterone, taken right before bedtime, which gives you a nice little GABA push, very natural, non-addictive, and it is very effective to help patients with low progesterone to get to sleep. You could do an oral dose of compounded progesterone, probably gonna use between 25 and 100 milligrams, again taken before bedtime.
And when patients go to sleep, and sleep well, their HPA axis then shuts down, you get the release of growth hormone, TSH, the absorption of amino acids from the gut, the deposition of minerals into the bone, the activation of the immune function. All of those things are short-circuited when they don’t sleep. So if you see a progesterone that’s low, and you will augment that progesterone level, you’ll address one of the most common barriers to restoration of health.