Adrenal Fatigue

Bonnie, I have the name of a local Chinese Acupuncture practitioner. I did some acupuncture a few years ago but I had not found a good one at that time--she was looking in a book between each needle. Did not allow for much confidence and it did not help at all. I think someone experienced could really help.

Muse, I am talking about 5 to 7.5 mg a day of cortisol. A dose that is physiological.

Lately I have been doing some research into the methylation pathway. Apparantly some people are deficient in some enzymes in this pathway required to use folic acid properly, as well as make glutathione for the sulphur pathway, both are critically important body chemicals. It is known that people with chronic fatigue and fibro are deficient in glutathione. It sounds like the body is unable to take folic acid and turn it into the biological chemicals the body needs, or can do it only slowly. It could explain a lot--neural tube defects (I had a brother who died hours after birth) run in my family and both my sister and I have had miscarriages. Something like pregnancy and nursing could deplete the body of all stores of the critical chemicals, starting a cascade of depletion that runs rampant through the whole body and various other critical body functions are disfunctional--apparantly leading to a buildup of toxins and making all the glandular systems disfunctional. In one small trial, taking these supplements helped 80% of the fibro/chronic fatigue patients.

It would explain why I have been so much worse after each pregnancy and gradually got my stamina back after my first pregnancy. It is a theory. The solution is to take these chemicals in through supplementation--folinic acid and 5-methyltetrahydrafolate, as well as precursers of glutathione. Interestingly, people with the fibro/chronic fatigue syndrome have a lot of metabolic problems in common with children with autism--there is a theory floating about that they are one and the same, just affecting people differently because of when in development it is triggered or becomes an issue. I have a couple of cousins who are autistic, on the same side of the family with all the health problems that I have mentioned before. Maybe it is all just a coincidence and maybe I'm looking for patterns where there are none, but if a couple of supplements that are very inexpensive could change my life and that of an entire side of my family, I'm going to try them, especially since I believe they are fairly inocuous otherwise.

Whatever this is, it is robbing me of the life I want to live and my children of the mother they could have if I were well. I will continue to pursue this til the bitter end!

I would like to refresh this thread, because everything points out that I have Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome. I've been considering it for a long time, searching info about this fringe disease. It may not be recognized by conventional medicine yet, but I can can assure all of you that it exist.

My symptoms are: severe fatigue, constant 924/7) brain fog, which is never getting better, hypoglycemia (worse during a crash caused by too much stress or lack of sleep), low blood pressure, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome and many other symptoms. I also have UARS, GERD because of hiatal hernia (years of constipation and coughing due to asthma), asthma, post nasal drip, vasomotor rhinitis since 2009, TMJ, scoliosis and few other things.

I realise that I am completely broken, I am 23 years old and have worse health than many 70-80-90 old people It is very sad, but at least I know what is wrong with me. Adrenal fatigue came to my life after very stressful time of my life, and after very severe flu it worsened to the point that I couldn't work anymore. The worst thing is, I know that without treating my UARS problem I will never recover, but I am still not able to use it, despite trying really hard. Last year I had somnoplasty of the soft palate, worked for 7 months only. I am taking special vitamins for AF(alternative medicine doctors adocate them to use in adrenal fatigue), but honestly I don't feel ANY different. I am sticking to healthy diet (meat, vegetables, seeds, some fruits, small amounts of eggs and dairy), which is also recommended in treatment of AF. And I am doing many other things too. Nothing works I don't know what to do. I know, that all this is not in my head and I am not a hypochondriac (I wish I was). Is there anyone out there with such problems? I am trying everything to make BiPAP work for me, but is is still to no avail. I am concidering MMA surgery but: A I don't have money (cash from my parents, which I would try to avoid...) B I can't imagine that I would survice such an extensive surgery in such weakend state, so it is out of question for now. BiPAP is my only hope, I am so close and yet so far.

Catherine, the subject of POTS just came up on another thread, did you catch it? Good timing for you to resurrect this thread. Adrenal fatigue definitely goes along with the dysautonomia syndromes because you can only crank out high levels of stress hormones for so long before your adrenals get depleted. The untreated UARS will also keep your stress hormones high. I'm so sorry you're having these struggles with your health at such a young age. If you haven't already, can you provide more specific information about your struggles with BiPAP? There are some wonderful people here who might have helpful suggestions. Because you're right, the uncontrolled UARS will keep your already hyperexcitable nervous system in overdrive and keep you in the state you're currently in. Let's see if you can get more specific help from this forum. And know that some people here also suffer with POTS and various dysautonomias and have great empathy for what you're going through.

CatherineF wrote:I would like to refresh this thread, because everything points out that I have Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome. I've been considering it for a long time, searching info about this fringe disease. It may not be recognized by conventional medicine yet, but I can can assure all of you that it exist.

My symptoms are: severe fatigue, constant 924/7) brain fog, which is never getting better, hypoglycemia (worse during a crash caused by too much stress or lack of sleep), low blood pressure, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome and many other symptoms. I also have UARS, GERD because of hiatal hernia (years of constipation and coughing due to asthma), asthma, post nasal drip, vasomotor rhinitis since 2009, TMJ, scoliosis and few other things.

I realise that I am completely broken, I am 23 years old and have worse health than many 70-80-90 old people It is very sad, but at least I know what is wrong with me. Adrenal fatigue came to my life after very stressful time of my life, and after very severe flu it worsened to the point that I couldn't work anymore. The worst thing is, I know that without treating my UARS problem I will never recover, but I am still not able to use it, despite trying really hard. Last year I had somnoplasty of the soft palate, worked for 7 months only. I am taking special vitamins for AF(alternative medicine doctors adocate them to use in adrenal fatigue), but honestly I don't feel ANY different. I am sticking to healthy diet (meat, vegetables, seeds, some fruits, small amounts of eggs and dairy), which is also recommended in treatment of AF. And I am doing many other things too. Nothing works I don't know what to do. I know, that all this is not in my head and I am not a hypochondriac (I wish I was). Is there anyone out there with such problems? I am trying everything to make BiPAP work for me, but is is still to no avail. I am concidering MMA surgery but: A I don't have money (cash from my parents, which I would try to avoid...) B I can't imagine that I would survice such an extensive surgery in such weakend state, so it is out of question for now. BiPAP is my only hope, I am so close and yet so far.

CatherineF wrote:I would like to refresh this thread, because everything points out that I have Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome. I've been considering it for a long time, searching info about this fringe disease. It may not be recognized by conventional medicine yet, but I can can assure all of you that it exist.

It does exist. It is not in your head. There may be some things that may help, or at least cope. I am one of the people in the POTS discussion just now in another thread:
viewtopic/t79857/Sleep-disorders-and-pulse-rate.html

My symptoms are: severe fatigue, constant 924/7) brain fog, which is never getting better, hypoglycemia (worse during a crash caused by too much stress or lack of sleep), low blood pressure, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome and many other symptoms. I also have UARS, GERD because of hiatal hernia (years of constipation and coughing due to asthma), asthma, post nasal drip, vasomotor rhinitis since 2009, TMJ, scoliosis and few other things.

You have many symptoms shared with my wife, who has a specific form of POTS, but her she does not has sleep apnea stacked upon that as you do. I'm the apnea guy in our family, she's the potsy one. She and I have been on a long 4 year journey with POTS, starting with neurologists, then cardiologists, then a diagnosis from the Univ. of MN, then to another cardiologist that specializes in POTS at the Minneapolis Heart Institute, but he was yet baffled by my wife's symptoms so she went to Mayo for a week's testing, their thorough POTS screening and now on return and revisit with the cardiologist and some extending research by me, we've finally filled in all the symptom blanks and have a full diagnosis.

I don't know where you are in your POTS diagnostic journey, starting out or part way, but maybe I can offer some help.

I do believe that cognitive impairment can come from POTS due to low blood perfusion if you have low pulse pressure (difference in your blood pressure readings, systolic and diastolic), and GERD and constipation are common with POTS as well. Brain fog could equally be coming from ineffectively treated apneas / low oxygen at night, narcoleptic tendencies and such, disordered sleep. If you have been diagnosed with POTS and put on propranolol, be aware it significantly disturbs sleep.

Tell us more about your POTS, if you feel so inclined to share.

Great question.

Unfortunately, the first responder didnt identify a leak, only info about using the steroid such as hydrocortisol for example.

True, you have to be careful with it.

Ive long suspected apnea is either caused or CAUSES immune problems whether it be fibromyalgia, AI, etc.

Actually, the new data is indicating that untreated apnea can cause much worse including MS, parkinsons, etc. Reason enough to
hose up. The option "i just dont like it" is more or less a self assisted suicide of sorts.

Theres also the issue of whether is actually a plunge in 02 (oximetry) thats the underlying cause of some correlative factor to
adrenal insufficiency.

I would recommend the saliva cortisol test to find out how you test out.

DavidCarolina wrote:I would recommend the saliva cortisol test to find out how you test out.

Interesting that you mention that as I just learned of it. Mayo did not do a saliva test. There are a number of adrenal tests, 24 hr urine, blood and saliva. Mayo did the first two only and the blood was checked in a couple tests. I think it would have been useful if they had done the saliva. The 24 hr urine test is not particularly good for detecting dysautonomic adrenal "floods", because my wife's was negative (slightly elevated) but she had significant norepinephrine and epinephrine levels on one of her blood tests. It's the test where you lay supine 30 minutes very quietly, draw blood, stand up for some minutes, draw blood (sounds like someone merely sleeping and getting up, eh?). She shot off the chart, turned crimson and felt like crap. The urine test may be OK when looking for metabolites of norepinephrine and epinephrine from secreting tumors (pheochromocytoma). Pheochromocytomas are pretty rare, thank goodness, because it's a dangerous operation to remove them.

To Catherine - when's the last time you had a legitimate endocrinology work-up, including thyroid studies and whatever else was suggested by a new doctor? How many of the diagnoses you listed have been documented by doctors?

It is so easy to convince yourself you have this syndrome, or that one, especially if you're not feeling well, but you may not be in the right frame of mind (having brain fog) to make decisions based on based on symptoms posted on the internet... At age 23, to decide you are 'broken' (really?) is asking for skepticism. If you really have been told after testing that you have all those problems, why are they not being followed up with proper treatment rather than you're stumbling around looking at alternative medicine on your own? You will be taken more seriously by medical people if you tone down the rhetoric and just tell them what you actually feel, but not come up with diagnoses yourself. Let them do their job (or change doctors) and you might just get the answers you want. I'm sorry if this doesn't sound very friendly or understanding, but I know doctors and know who they give credibility to and who they don't and you certainly need help from them if all you claim has been noted.

CatherineF wrote:Adrenal fatigue came to my life after very stressful time of my life, and after very severe flu ...

From what I've read, if your POTS is caused by an illness and you are young, there is a higher probability that it may decrease over time, perhaps even go away. Julie is right, attitude is everything. Grab the bull by the horns and tell it "You ain't gonna git ME down!" and pursue it with the doctors, with a "I'm gonna fix this" attitude. Find a doc that knows POTS well, is willing to listen and work with you on it, both in diagnostic testing and treatment.

For the past 7 months I've been searching for answers . I would wake at night feeling dizzy, nauseus and then couldn't get back to sleep. The following 3-5 days would be dizzy, confused and unproductive, sometimes spent in bed. I've had cat scans of my brain and neck , vertebral arteries, and a million other tests. All of which say 'normal'.
Seeing these episodes always began in my sleep, I suggested to my GP ( yes!, I suggested to HIM) a sleep study may provide clues.
I was having mild apnea events and began a CPAP trial for 2 months

Since then, I also found an acupuncturist (Japanese style) who suggested I have AF

once i knew this ... i suddenly realised that the topical steroid cream I'd been using daily for 12 years!!! Was also contributing to my woes.


When I saw the sleep specialist just yesterday, I mentioned AF and she suggested that the apnea events
Alone are definitely enough to cause AF over a period of just weeks let alone the DERM-AID CREAM abuse.

I was also falling into the trap of trying to get fit before I got healthy!
If i Felt a bit better I'd go for a run , next day, another crash!
I'm feeling much much better and now if I crash , the recovery time is a day at most
Still have a ways to go but feel I have my life back!

If you have AF , I recommend doing a sleep study as it may be apnea that is the cause of your woes


I wish all of you luck as it is the worst I have felt in my 52 years!

Phil

This thread seems to have gone off on its own direction a bit, so for anyone like me who came here googling for sleep apnea & adrenal fatigue I wanted to bump the answer below, which I think is excellent.

I've suffered from UARS for 10 years, diagnosed for 5, still not very well managed despite multiple surgeries. I also had many of the early adrenal fatigue warnings - working long hours, using stimulants to have the energy to do it, taking on too much, etc. After a combination of extremely stressful events last year, I burnt out in a very adrenal fatigue-ish sort of way and am slowly recovering.

It is tempting to look for there being a single root cause, but as Dr. Park's wonderful book "Sleep...Interrupted" points out, for many aspects of SDB, A causes B causes A. It seems likely my UARS was a huge chronic stressor on my adrenals, and perhaps if I had good sleep every night instead of crappy sleep, I could have weathered the stress without becoming totally exhausted for over a year. But I also had lots of life stress and some lifestyle habits that put additional demands on my adrenals - perhaps if I'd "only" had UARS, my adrenals would have been OK for another 10 or 20 years.

While little has been written about it, I agree with the others here who say that in the adrenal fatigue model, sleep-disordered breathing is likely a major chronic stressor. So people with SDB are likely predisposed to AF, and those with AF symptoms can benefit from the healing techniques of AF. But without addressing the SDB, they will never be able to fully recover, because a major chronic stressor will remain.

I would expect fixing SDB to heal AF much more than fixing AF to heal SDB. But that doesn't mean addressing AF shouldn't be part of your health plan, it just shouldn't be as much a priority as addressing the SDB.

old64mb wrote:

suneilp wrote:Can sleep apnea itself bring about adrenal fatigue?

Both Captain Midnight and Schnertling offer good answers. I'll try another one.

First question is whether or not adrenal fatigue is a real condition or is just being used to sell books and supplements: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/adrena ... ue/AN01583

Having gone through many years of alternative medicine before finding what appears to be the underlying cause of UARS and OSA, I think it has a place as an adjunct for some things...but grand unified theories like this tend to be another story.

That said, one of the things that has really disappointed me is how relatively little work there's been done on sleep disorders and hormones, since there's a ton of evidence that it can plays utter havoc with them. Legitimate, peer reviewed studies in reputable journals show some great correlations between OSA and large increases in cortisol, leptin levels and resistance and fat distribution, show how progesterone/estrogen do have a preventive effect in women, that release of growth hormone is directly related to deep sleep (which is why all the steroidal baseball players took GHB, much safer and less detectable then injecting yourself), that endogenous testosterone levels go way down with OSA, that administration of exogenous testosterone can massively exacerbate your AHI (probably because you screw up hormonal production and balance even further), and that there's chronic inflammation in a variety of ways when your brain and body are forced to do battle each night. All those can be aided significantly by dealing with the underlying sleep disorder.

But considering the size of the problem, there's very little research being done. Worse yet, almost nobody specializes in it; I'm still trying to find an endocrinologist who even knows about sleep medicine, let alone passing their sleep boards. That's almost frightening, considering how often testosterone replacement therapy is now prescribed without checking for an underlying sleep condition. You'll feel great...on your way to an early death.

So to answer your question in another way, yes, you could have "adrenal fatigue." But it's better to put it this way - you probably have a bunch of stuff going on with hormones thanks to your SBD. Get that under control first, and then 6 months seems to be the time frame in which the studies show there can be a range of improvements.

By the way, if you've not read Dr. Park's book, Sleep Interrupted, it's worth it for your question on GERD. He answers it in a way that is beyond my ability.

I think I have adrenal fatigue from sleep apnea, my cortisol levels at 1pm were 2.4. I wonder if it was because of the asthma steroids and long term use of short courses of prednisone, but I feel better now after taking more prednisone and klonopin. I would always taper the prednisone. I'm still exhausted many days when I can't sleep deeply or at all on the asv.