Dr. Ellen Csepe // www.ptonice.com In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Older Adult division teaching assistant Ellen Csepe discusses which patients are prone to sleep apnea, how to identify signs & symptoms, and when to know to refer & who to refer to Take a listen to the episode or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog. If you're looking to learn more, check out our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab. EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION INTRODUCTIONHey everyone, Alan here, Chief Operating Officer here at ICE. Before we get into today's episode, I'd like to introduce our sponsor, Jane, a clinic management software and EMR with a human touch. Whether you're switching your software or going paperless for the first time ever, the Jane team knows that the onboarding process can feel a little overwhelming. That's why with Jane, you don't just get software, you get a whole team. Including in every Jane subscription is their new award-winning customer support available by phone, email, or chat whenever you need it, even on Saturdays. You can also book a free account setup consultation to review your account and ensure that you feel confident about going live with your switch. And if you'd like some extra advice along the way, you can tap into a lovely community of practitioners, clinic owners, and front desk staff through Jane's community Facebook group. If you're interested in making the switch to Jane, head on over to jane.app.switch to book a one-on-one demo with a member of Jane's support team. Don't forget to mention code IcePT1MO at the time of sign up for a one month free grace period on your new Jane account. ELLEN CSEPE Good morning everybody and welcome to the PT on ICE daily show brought to you by the Institute of Clinical Excellence. My name is Dr. Ellen Csepe. I'm an outpatient physical therapist. I'm also a teaching assistant with the modern management of the older adults division. I'm coming to you live from Littleton, Colorado today, repping my Denver Nuggets playoff shirt. And today, my goal has been for several months now to make sure that physical therapists are here to support the growing patient population with obesity. I really want to make sure that physical therapists are involved in this conversation to meet their needs because this population is growing rapidly and the healthcare world needs all hands on deck to help support this patient population. Today, for today's Leadership Thursday, We're going to be talking about obesity and sleep apnea. So in a lot of our course conversations, we talk about the importance of sleep hygiene. We talk about how important sleep is to mitigate the risk of injury, to help with healing, to decrease pain. But I think it's a really missed opportunity if we don't talk about how obesity can cause sleep apnea and sleep disorders. And I think we should feel compelled as physical therapists to know those risk factors and also kind of be the first responders for our patient population to make sure we pass the baton to the right clinician to help them with a potentially life-threatening problem. So what you can expect today, we're going to talk about how sleep apnea and obesity are related, but not mutually exclusive. Then we'll talk a little bit more about what the symptoms of sleep apnea are in both adults and children. Next, we'll talk about our screening tools that we can use in the clinic to look for sleep apnea. And last, we'll talk about where to pass the baton to make sure that we refer patients to the right discipline to help manage this issue and what treatment might look like with them. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OBESITY & SLEEP APNEA So first, obesity and sleep apnea are very closely related. Sleep apnea incidence has increased significantly in the past several decades, largely because of the increase in obesity rates in our country. Sleep apnea is basically a loss of breathing or difficulty breathing at night, which can be life threatening. Obesity is a disease and how we look at it. And that disease is kind of twofold. First, we look at obesity as an adiposopathy disease, which basically means sick fat disease. What that implies is that excess adipose tissue basically sends excessive chemical messengers throughout our bodies, which puts us at risk for diseases like cancer, heart disease. diabetes, also hypertension, all of those are chemically mediated from excess adipose tissue in our bodies. Then we also look at obesity as a fat mass disease. And what I mean by that is that excess adipose tissue puts physical pressure on our joint structures, like our joints, increasing risk factors for arthritis, But the way that sleep apnea is a disease is because excess adipose tissue ...
