Using Sleep Actigraphy for the Validation of Wellness

How to know if the new drug or supplements you are on are doing you 'any' good especially if you have long COVID or are vaccine injured.

Mpl Sleep Article 2019 4 11 (1)

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There is a growing appreciation in addition to maintaining a healthy diet and weight, exercise, low carbohydrates and low stress that good, restful sleep is another pillar of health. But could it be that monitoring sleep could be used to validate whether or not your supplements or prescriptions are doing you any good? Is your healthy lifestyle as healthy as it could be?

The trouble has been that polysomnography assessments which can leave clients high on the glue used to attach electrodes, rarely if ever provided a representative sampling of the typical sleep architecture of the patient. And so sleep research and advances in sleep therapy had been greatly stymied.

Even with the at home sleep actigraphy devices, it is imperative that typical versus atypical sleep patterns are distinguished as illustrated in the above article. Alcohol, sugar bolus, pain, noise, toxic but common drugs and yes of course the day light saving change in the spring, all can exhibit temporary interference in one’s zzz’s and well-being. Often a bad night of sleep is compensated the next night for by a good night’s rest, but again this is not typical and should not be counted as such.

Nevertheless using a sleep diary, one can collate the atypical sleep patterns away from the typical sleep patterns to assess the health impacts of interventions, especially those drugs or supplements designed to reduce insomnia and fatigue associated with post-viral syndromes like chronic fatigue syndrome.

This is a timely subject given the high incidence rates of long COVID (a post-viral syndrome) following natural infections and that the most commonly reported signs and symptoms of COVID-19 vaccine injury relate to insomnia and fatigue.

In the above paper, the 65 year old on ISM aminomics therapy which included a new sleep product called NuSleep, showed excellent sleep parameters that well exceeded expectations of her age group and even those of much younger adults. The lack of hypertension was confirmed with a total sleep time between 420 and 440 minutes despite the fact that the client has genetic high cholesterol (heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia).

However following a 3 day washout period (see details in Figure 1 below) the dechallenge actigram confirmed the underlying diagnosis of sleep disruption characteristic of chronic fatigue syndrome that the client had since 1994. {The client had been injected with pooled human HCG in December 1993 at the age of 39, which incidentally the donors or the products had never been tested for infectious agents and no viral inactivation steps were taken during the manufacturing process. Ergo it is thought the hemolytic-uremic syndrome that occurred 4 months later related to contamination with an unknown virus, which subsequently led to peripheral neuropathy issues and chronic fatigue syndrome thereafter. Thus, in this case a source of a viral infection was identified consistent with this chronic fatigue syndrome being a post-viral syndrome.}

Not surprisingly, the abnormal sleep parameters recorded when the client stopped using the aminomics and NuSleep protocol resembled that reported for chronic fatigue syndrome. At the very least, this data substantiates that NuSleep and aminomics therapy are not harmful to the host and promote excellent sleep architecture.

Figure 1 – Representative Actigraphy Sleep Architecture Histograms

Sleep architecture by Fitbit Versa representing: A, B Atypical Sleep on Aminomics™ therapy (A= earache no drugs, B= toxic combined use of naproxen with acetaminophen prior to initiating sleep); C, D Typical Sleep on Aminomics™ therapy; E, F Sleep During Dechallenge without Aminomics™ therapy (after a 10 and 9 day washout).  Note the telltale signs of the presence of deep sleep cycles within the last 1.5 hours of the sleep cycle in A, C, D but not E and F is associated with being on Aminomics™ therapy. These disappeared after the 3-day washout and were absent in all the dechallenge sleep monitoring histograms (E, F and data not shown).  

Around March 27, 2019, a copy of an earlier version of the above article along with recommendations for improving the software was sent to FITBIT, the manufacturer of the Versa device that was used to record the sleep actigraphy. Not too long after (by the end of August 2019) one was able to capture and report if the sleep data was atypical or not (and for what reason). In addition by subscribing to FITBIT Premium this would provide access to the long-awaited Sleep Score feature, which added a quality metric to the total sleep time and sleep stages data that the app already logged, permitting instant interpretation. These changes should improve the collection of proper sleep data and provide more accurate reference ranges by FITBIT. More importantly this should allow consumers the opportunity to more easily gauge if new drugs or supplements improve health or at least tackle the symptoms of insomnia and fatigue associated with long COVID and vaccine injury.

If sleep actigraphy can be used to objectively assess effectiveness of drugs and/or supplements at the individual level then this would serve to pave the way to a revolution in health care as we know it today. Many drugs, herbal medicines and yes even the revered plant protein over whey protein, are immunosuppressive in part due to the fact they are more often than not, anti-inflammatory in nature, and thus apt to interfere with sleep.

It would be interesting if FITBIT would release its analysis on sleep actigraphy pre and post COVID infections and vaccines given that these changes were implemented prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in August 2019.