Kidney Disease And Sleep
How to improve kidney disease and sleep better but if you don’t restrict lower your salt intake it doesn’t really work as well and it can work much better when you restrict your salt intake so we’re going to talk about how to improve kidney disease there’s a lot of different ways and a lot of different things you should do you shouldn’t just look to do one thing when you’re trying to improve kidney disease because generally doing one thing isn’t the best approach and you’re going to get limited results and sometimes you might not get any results by doing one thing alone.
So you want to take your medications as prescribed because there’s things like high blood pressure that you can’t control very well naturally especially when the kidney is really really damaged so take things as you should get a good nephrologist we talk about in other videos how you need a good nephrologist at least two to three opinions to really get the most amount of information and treatments that you can because um you know just one person one brain isn’t as good as multiple people with multiple brains looking at different areas of your kidney okay so let’s talk about sleep sleep insomnia sleep issues sleep problems very common in people with kidney disease because there’s melatonin a sleep hormone there’s melatonin receptors on the kidney so if the kidney is damaged your melatonin is not working as well your circadian cycle your circadian rhythm your sleep cycle isn’t going to work as well so what can you do about it you can take a supplement called melatonin now melatonin is is a hormone okay it’s a hormone secreted from the pineal gland which is it’s in your brain more towards the back here and it regulates your sleeping cycle and if you go to the national library of medicine and just type in melatonin and kidney disease we have 366 references.
Doses & Melatonin
And if you just scroll through you’re going to see that melatonin looks to improve every single area they study it with kidney disease it doesn’t seem to matter you get improvement and a really good thing is that people sleep better okay i wish i knew more about melatonin when i was much younger i didn’t use it till i was late and i’ve used it for a lot of periods of time when i needed it when i wasn’t sleeping well so melatonin you can purchase over the counter online you can go to a local store and it’s a variety of doses available the most common dose of melatonin is three milligrams now with people with kidney issues you can go between three milligrams and up to 10 milligrams safely.
This all depends on what’s going to work for you to get you to sleep and stay asleep without waking up groggy so we always recommend starting with three milligrams you might need six the key to this is finding the right dose where you don’t wake up groggy and tired so let’s say you go to six milligrams of melatonin you find that that’s that’s making you groggy and tired you can back it down to three and that might be the right dose for you so it does require some experimentation but three to ten milligrams looks very safe good to do people have done it for long term with kidney disease we have study that studies of like six months so short term don’t worry about it.
One side effect is vivid dreaming which some people don’t like they find that their dreams are just too bitter they don’t like it another side effect is a very small percentage of people with melatonin get the opposite effect would actually feel more energetic but that’s a really small percentage for the most people melatonin works great it’s excellent it can help improve kidney health of all parameters plus sleeping better and if you if you keep a high salt diet or if you don’t use a low salt diet it’s not going to work as well it looks like in some of the research.
Low Salt Diet
When you use a low salt diet along with the melatonin you could reduce the amount of protein in your urine but if you don’t have that lower salt diet to accompany it it doesn’t seem to have that benefit but you’ll have all those other benefits that are really good for the kidney so melatonin if you’re looking to improve kidney disease you always should restrict your sodium that’s the one nutrient you want to just reduce as much as possible under the current recommendations of 2000 milligrams per day some go as high as 2300 milligrams i like 1500 or less but if you’re 2000 or less milligrams of sodium per day you’re doing excellent for your kidney health.
