Part 1: Dr. Michael Thorpy Emphasizes Low-Sodium Therapy Options for Sleep Disorders

Readers can also check out part 2 now.

Understanding existing patient sodium intake and medication availability is key in prescribing medications to patients with sleep disorders like excessive daytime sleepiness or narcolepsy, explains Michael Thorpy, MD, professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and director of the Sleep Disorder Center at Montefiore Medical Center.

Transcript

Why is it important to consider low-sodium sleep medications and salt/sodium intake with therapeutics and not only food for patients with sleep disorders?

There's an increasing awareness about the importance of salts in our diets. It seems as though every few years there are recommendations that are made about limiting the amount of salt intake that we take. At the present time, the American Heart Association recommends that people should only ingest about 2300 mg of salt a day. Ideally, it should be even less than that at 1500 mg.

However, some of the medications do have a fairly high salt content, and the one that's of particular concern in sleep medicine is the salt content of a medication that's used for the treatment of narcolepsy and other disorders of excessive daytime sleepiness. There is a formulation called sodium oxybate, which at the highest recommended dose contains 1940 mg of salt, or sodium. It is estimated that the average intake of salt in the United States is 3400 mg a day. If somebody is taking the maximum dose of sodium oxybate, then they're getting probably over 5000 mg of salt a day. That amount of salt seems to be somewhat excessive.

So, there is some concern about that, and new formulations of the sodium oxybate have been developed that have a much lower sodium content, so as to prevent people from having an excessive amount of salt intake.