 Hello everyone. Today I want to share with you an interesting patient case that may apply to you. If you landed on my channel, you probably have diabetes or know someone with diabetes. What about sleep troubles? Are they related? Can lack of sleep increase your type 2 diabetes risk or even make your diabetes control worse? Stay tuned and find out. So about four weeks ago, I saw this 42 year old gentleman who has referred to me for insulin resistance. As I evaluated him, I found all the hallmarks of insulin resistance. Now, he had abdominal obesity, he had skin tags, which we have a video about, and there's something called acontosis negrocans, which is darkening around his neck. Look at this. Check out my previous video if you haven't seen it already, more about insulin resistance. So I asked him about a simple question. How is your sleep? Do you feel like you get enough hours of sleep each night? I already knew that his answer was not going to be right because sleep definitely can be hard to get. He answered me with an exhausted face. Not much. Maybe four or five hours on average, he said. I knew that was a problem and I ordered some labs, advised him on a potential treatment plan, and we scheduled the follow-up. One of the labs that I ordered was to check his level of free fatty acids. Now, free fatty acids are essentially the major fuel for your body. You're probably wondering how is this connected to sleep and diabetes, right? Well, substances like free fatty acids interfere with the ability of insulin to regulate blood sugar levels. Studies also show that the lack of sleep increases free fatty acid levels in the blood. So according to a study, as long as free fatty acid levels in the blood remained high, the ability of insulin to regulate blood sugar levels were impaired. To conduct the study, they used healthy individuals and they divided into groups who got a full night's sleep as well as a group who only got four hours of sleep. And the study proved just this. The participants who were not getting enough sleep had high levels of free fatty acids. And the ability of insulin to regulate blood sugar levels for those individuals wasn't impaired. The study was great. It was the evidence that lack of sleep caused insulin to do its job less effectively. The insulin action in these healthy young individuals resembled what you would typically see in early stages of diabetes. Can you believe that? It also provides evidence that lack of sleep disrupts fat metabolism, which suggests that increasing your amount of sleep may reduce rates of obesity and diabetes. Sometimes we take sleep for granted guys. We have insomnia. You may have a crying baby just like mine or you work all the hours that interfere with your sleep. But sleep is crucial because it allows insulin to do what? To do its job better. If you want to know, this particular patient's free fatty acids were screamingly high. We worked together to come up with a plan and began to get more sleep at night. So we did a follow-up as I said and the blood work showed a significant improvement in his ferric fatty acids and he also showed a substantial improvement in regards to his insulin resistance. He was able to cut back on a lot of medications. So the bottom line guys, get more sleep. At least try to. If you're having trouble sleeping, talk to your doctor, get a plan, follow the sleep hygiene rules because losing sleep causes so much more than feeling tired the next day. Anyway, I hope you learned something from me today guys. Share this patient experience with the people you may know and if you liked this video, give it a thumbs up, share and remember to subscribe. See you in the next video. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying this channel so far and I hope you subscribed already. If you didn't do it and if you did, watch this video right there. I think that will help you too.