hello
you’re probably aware this is all about hormones and heart rate variability and I am Luann Lavin nurse practitioner
here at the Maxwell clinic and I’m very happy to have Dr David Ferris MD here
with me today as well um to chime in about hormones and the dysfunction of hormones
and or the good function of hormones and how our heart and heart rate variability
with our autonomic nervous system is playing a huge role in how we are able
to support or not support are really good hormone uh regulation for ourselves
so you’re probably aware of how good you can really feel when your hormones are working well I mean that’s how we grow
up if we’re fortunate right but you also may be aware of how terrible you can
feel when things aren’t going right and we don’t always know if there are hormones but very many times they can be
so here at the Maxwell Clinic we do a lot of testing and we are finding that yes we really
focus on diet and we really focus on exercise and adapting our lifestyle
modifications as optimally as we can do but we also know that there is a deep
rooted autonomic nervous system that is constantly beating the drum and that’s
coming from our heart and that heart rate variability So today we’re going to talk about all that and hormones in
general I just want to put a foundation out there so you know what I mean when I’m talking about hormones and just talk
about the basics of hormones for a minute so this applies to men and to women and
yes men have estrogen and progesterone and testosterone just like women do
um we do know that estrogens can have an inflammatory effect they also can be
amazing and grow things uh just lovely in our bodies but when they get out of
control it can be inflammation and we’re seeing this in both sexes and I’m going
to give you some examples of that here in a minute progesterone which is a foundational
hormone is our calming hormone relaxing us helping us to sleep at night
and both estrogen and progesterone are strongly needed to be in Balance especially in women and my patients are
used to seeing me go like this when I’m discussing that the yin and the Yang the progesterone and the estrogen and also
in men and we do know testosterone is a um the hormone that’s probably the most
predominant in both sexes it is the most abundant um but that estrogen and progesterone
are the ones that really need to have the balance yes we need all of them so those are the big players of hormones
that I’m discussing and referring to today in our discussion here there is
another one that is just a big deal you know which one I’m going to talk about right
it’s called cortisol so cortisol is a hormone that is oftentimes referred to
as a sex a sex hormone or a stress hormone is what I really wanted to say and so cortisol quite often will just
come in there and really mess up some of these great estrogen and progesterone ratios
um and why do we need cortisol and why is cortisol so important is that it is a
life a life sustainer if you don’t have cortisol you’re not here and your body
is always going to default to making cortisol instead of estrogen or progesterone or
testosterone and so oftentimes your sex hormones can suffer because your body is
recognizing it needs that extra cortisol to stay up late at night it needs that extra cortisol to do that workout it
needs that extra cortisol to take care of your children to drive the car wherever you’re going on vacation
um and so to do your job and to be able to function at work so um yes you can see when the body is
defaulting to needing to make cortisol absolutely always will or you’re not
going to be here anymore then the estrogens and the progesterones and the testosterones
may not get made the way they need to and things can get out of balance some
of the chronic diseases that you all may know and you I’m hoping that those of you who are joining us today or if you
know people who are suffering from these hormone dysfunctions have them tune into
this discussion because um they’re quite popular
diseases or dysfunctions that we’re dealing with with hormones
um it can start when we’re younger the first menstrual cycle I know you didn’t have a menstrual cycle
so Dr Ferris won’t relate to this one but if you’re a male and you’re younger
and your hormones can get dysregulated you may be gaining weight and you’re wondering why is that happening
sometimes we get gynecomastia or breasts in men um and sometimes there’s just no energy
and we’re seeing this younger and younger in young children might be exposed to mold or whatever
um so yes that is a disease where your hormones are getting
um off also as young women we grow up and we
get cramping PMS headaches irritability things are starting to happen heavy menstrual flows
irregular Cycles you might find yourself spotting or going two months without having a menstrual cycle
something called endometriosis and it’s a very um complex dysfunctional hormonal
disease but your estrogens and your testosterones and your
progesterone are just not in good balance and it tends to be more of an
estrogen dominant kind of a situation that happens and you’re wondering why right
um there and we’re here to talk to you about how this can very much be related
to heart rate and your autonomic nervous system
um PCOS polycystic ovarian syndrome has anybody heard of that
um your estrogens and your testosterones are really kind of doing their thing and they’re fighting each other just like
insulin and um glucose can fight each other in diabetes
so um yes this too can be addressed through what we’re going to talk about today
also early onset of ovarian failure or premature menopause and then we have
menopause and there might be many of you out there because I know many of our patients here are experiencing this and
I talk a lot with my patients about autonomic nervous system and heart rate
variability with menopause so those are some things if you know people who are suffering from these
issues please have them tune in and learn more about what we’re going to discuss today so we have ovaries as women you have
testes as men and we also have adrenal glands at both of us Sexes have adrenal
glands those adrenal glands are really important they’re these tiny little Walnut size glands that are on the back
of our kidneys they have nothing to do with kidney function but they’re hanging out there making cortisol
making the word salt right like all day long depends on how much they need to make cortisol and sometimes they get
exhausted or fatigued sometimes they can’t work for us and we’re like nope I’m gonna have to stay in bed today
and then you also have when you are a woman your ovaries which are making your
estrogens and progesterones and testosterones until you go through menopause and once you go through
menopause those ovaries close down or you could have surgical menopause for
whatever reason they can close down early and then your adrenal glands are left to really take over the job of not
only just making the cortisol food every day but also helping out to make
whatever they can do with those sex hormones as well very overwhelming okay and we wonder why
menopause can be so difficult um so these this is just the foundation
of how things work hormonally in your body and so how then do we get this autonomic
nervous system and heart rate variability um that can help with this you know your
ovaries making making your sex hormones your testes making your sex hormones your adrenal glands making your cortisol
and you know there’s a certain beat that’s going on there through your body right well if that beats going really
fast you might be getting dysregulated and
we’re going to talk about those things because this is very real
um yes we talk about diet a lot and yes we talk about exercise a lot and so
Stress Management is something we’re having conversations about but there’s
so many of our patients that are doing really great things managing their stress yoga instructors deep breathing
stretching gardening reading just meditating before you get out of bed and
all different kinds of things that our patients are doing and this is wonderful but how do you
know if it’s really effective it sounds good and it might feel good
but how do we know if it’s actually able to
um help our autonomic nervous system and so that our hormones aren’t getting out
of control and that our adrenal glands aren’t getting overworked and fatigued
and that all those things are able to keep in sync well we think we have some
answers we’re going to talk about them today um one of the things that we put in the little blurb about this lecture that was
um you know what we were going to talk about was that your hormones are supposed to be this beautiful Orchestra
all these fabulous instruments because estrogen progesterone and testosterone and cortisol are only some of those
hormones and there are hundreds of them um so they all need to play together beautifully and I really feel and
believe and I think we now know that that autonomic nervous system helps that it’s a conductor
but I think there’s two conductors actually and the one is the autonomic
nervous system things that are happening automatically and the other one can be your sympathetic nervous system so there
can be this autonomic nervous system rest and Digest sympathetic nervous system is when you
are fight or flight there’s tiger chasing you and you’re running away from it and guess what we need both we need
to be able to run if there’s a tiger coming down the hallway right and we need to be able to rest in order to get
our energy back and reset our hormones and reset our neurotransmitters and allow our gut to heal so we need kind of
like two conductors um but if one conductor is getting more powerful than the other and you’re
constantly being chased by a tiger and you’re not resting and digesting that conductor isn’t there anyway that’s just
the way I’m looking at it these days and so I’m hoping I can turn it over to Dr
Ferris now and have him maybe shed some more light on how we can get both conductors to work really well and
together yeah so um some of you may have seen previous
webinars that I’ve done on heart rate variability and and how that relates to the
autonomic nervous system as Luann has said uh there there are two
branches of the autonomic nervous system the sympathetic nervous system which we
tend to associate with stress with fight or flight and the parasympathetic
nervous system which uh these these are two parts of the same system that work
together and hopefully in a balanced way to uh to promote and maintain health
uh the autonomic nervous system is that part of the overall nervous system that
regulates the number of things it regulates things like heartbeat uh
breathing uh digestion and hormonals so it plays a
it plays a major role in uh telling the
various lands that secrete specific hormones when to secrete and when not to
secrete so it makes sense that if we’re going to have as Luanne described uh a
well-balanced symphony of of hormones in the body that is is promoting Health
um that that we need to pay attention to the the autonomic nervous system so one
of the tools that we have that allows us to to get a good handle on on how well
is our autonomic nervous system doing is a concept called heart rate variability
and I’ve done a couple of webinars on various aspects of this in in the past
you can access access those to the Maxwell Clinic website
but um heart rate variability is not heart rate
when we think of heart rate we think of taking someone’s pulse and and measuring
how many beats per minute say when they’re seated in a chair
heart rate variability is a bit different it’s what we’re measuring there is how much variation is there in
heartbeat from beat to beat and we might think well if we’re at rest
and we’ve got a steady heart rate that heart rate variability is is very
consistent and that’s not the case it’s constantly changing and what it
represents is the ability of the body to respond to different changes in the
environment Heartbeat by heartbeat and adapting the body to best deal with
those there’s a tremendous body of published research underlying the and supporting
the science of heart rate variability this has been studied for decades and
and what we know is this individuals with higher levels of heart rate
variability tend to live longer and they tend to have less more less morbidity
so increased heart rate variability is a good thing
we can measure that and we’ve partnered with a Finnish company called first beat
some of you may have heard about that before um first beat is a specialized company
that that deals in the application of the science of heart rate
variability particularly with being able to measure and assess patterns of stress
and Recovery because what we’re after here is a balance between stress and
Recovery if we didn’t experience any stress we wouldn’t be worth much we
would get nothing accomplished so stress is a normal part of life and and it’s
healthy but when we have chronic stress when we’re not our bodies are not
getting the recovery that we need in sleep and during the day then it becomes
very disruptive and that’s going to play into the dysregulation of of this
Symphony of hormones that Luanne has has spoken to so one of the tools that uh first beat
the company has developed is something called first beat life
this involves wearing a a small monitoring device
which is attached with an electrode just under the right clavicle the right
collarbone and then it has another end which is attached to a second electrode
which is affixed to the left lower rib cage uh this is very lightweight uh you don’t
even know you’re wearing it once you you wear it but it gives us
um a real view into how the autonomic nervous system is functioning and again whether
the body is experiencing in a given moment high stress or is it experiencing
recovery so sympathetic activation or parasympathetic activation and there
should be a healthy interplay between those um you know during the day and
particularly at night when during sleep we want to see good solid
parasympathetic activation this uh this first beat device allows us
to measure that and so what we will do is we’ll issue one of these devices to a
patient um they we will have them initially wear it for 72 hours changing the electrodes
once a day typically when they shower or bathe it’s fine to wear the device
during exercise and we want patients to do that but uh you you can’t submerge it
in water or get it wet like in a in a shower so you can remove it then and then after you shower or bath
affix it with a new pair of electrodes and continue the to the monitoring
um this also has a uh in the latest version which we have been in the
process of implementing and replaces the previous first beat uh lifestyle
assessments that uh that we had done through 2022
um it has associated with it a smartphone app this works for both Android and uh
and iPhones uh you download the uh the app it is connected by a Bluetooth
connection with the monitoring device and it actually gives you real time data
back in a very understandable way of whether you’re parasympathetic system is
activated and you’re getting good recovery at that moment or whether the sympathetic system is activated and
you’re in in a stress mode oh can I ask a question sure so real time you would
see on your phone you’re able to see so if you see for example that during the
day you’re um you’ve just got lots of red which is
it’s all color coded so it’s easy to understand and you see that you’re just getting constant stress we will expect
the pattern to be mostly red during the day but what we would like to see are at
least some periods uh during the day when your body is able to switch into
parasympathetic activation and experience recovery and there are a number of uh simple Mind Body techniques
we can teach patients uh simple deep breathing is one of the simplest which
helps our bodies make a rapid transition from sympathetic to parasympathetic
activation and and we can see that now real time on the display on one
smartphone and then at the end of the monitoring period uh it the system
generates a a detailed report that the patient and his or her clinician can
review together uh to get that bigger picture of what their patterns of stress
and Recovery look like it’s particularly important uh one more
thing particularly important at night in sleep sleep is a critical period for
health we all need sufficient sleep and and what this allows us to see is is
there lots of green reflecting uh parasympathetic activation and Recovery
or as we commonly see when individuals are highly stressed when they’re
dysregulated they’re got it they’ve got lots of red at night and they’re they may be sleeping eight or nine hours a
night but they’re not getting the recovery they need so this is a really helpful tool we really like and endorse
that helps us help our patients get a good reading on their stress and
recovery and take concrete actions to improve the amount of recovery that
they’re getting uh when when there’s an issue and that’s going to lead back to where we started with healthy hormone
regulations as being a major contributor I’m sitting here thinking at making analogies and know many of our patients
know we use continuous glucose monitors to see how your blood sugars are doing so this is just another way that we can
be really looking at ourselves in real time and there may be some people patients that really like to see that
interaction and what they can do to make a difference in that monitoring and there may be other patients that prefer
maybe not to have the continual monitoring but just do the report and go over it with me so it sounds like it’s a
very first flexible kind of a tool um one of the advantages of a new first
speed life technology which is improvement over the first beat lifestyle assessment that we were using
previously is that when we issue this to a patient um to to do they will have access to the
monitoring device and the information coming to them live on on their smartphone for a three-month period of
time so there’s time to learn to be educated and then to try different
things interventions uh interventions to um to improve recovery except what works
for you and your recovery may not work for me in my recovery so you’re finding what works for you so we’re really
excited about this tool and uh it will play a huge role not only in helping
individuals regulate uh their their hormones but uh in all aspects of their
their lives I’m so grateful thank you very much for explaining that to us and I think we’re
just so grateful to have tools like this that we can use because we’re just seeing like Dr Farah said such a big
difference in chronic disease management when we can have more adaptability
through heart rate variability and that those chronic diseases we really can
transform them but we have to have that adaptability if you don’t then we don’t
see things changing so so maybe if there are any questions
in the few minutes we have left we could uh so this is going to be recorded so
certainly if you have any questions that you want to um get to us and we can respond to you at a later date let us
know um it looks like we do have a question the question is do you wear it for 72
hours or three months thank you I hope we didn’t confuse you
um and is the 72-hour just an initial analysis great thank you great great
question um in the in the previous lifestyle first
speed lifestyle assessment we did just a 72-hour monitoring generated a really
nice report that we could then review with the patient with first beat life is new iteration
the initial will have each patient initially do a 72 hour measurement as
they did before but then what we will do and that will generate a report very similar to the
the report we used previously that gives this big picture over 72 hours of
patterns of stress and recovery so that remains unchanged but then after that
for the remainder of that three-month period that the patient will have access to the monitoring device and
um the the smartphone app that provides the the patient with real-time data
through their phone uh they’ll be able to do repeat measurements we’ll actually
give each patient a packet of electrodes and we want to encourage them to do
repeat measurements uh at least several times over that three-month period it’s
up to the individual patient of how um how extensively want to use this and
those repeat measurements can be anywhere from 24 hours up to five days
I’ve done a number of five day measurements on myself and uh it’s easy
to do um easy to keep up with and and can be really helpful to see what does this
look like over uh a period of uh of three to five days so I hope that
answers the uh the question but great question I wouldn’t get one and wear it and see how that goes for me the night
time especially doing it asleep and over holiday times wouldn’t that be an interesting thing to kind of measure and
see what’s happening when we’re all so busy and we encourage people to do this during the work week and and have it
overlap for at least one if not two days over a weekend so you see what what do
those patterns look like on times when you’re probably likely to be under more stress and perhaps on a weekend less
stress all right well it doesn’t look like we have any more questions or does it uh-oh
I think there’s more questions yes we do uh let’s see how many times do we have
to be in the clinic or can some of this evaluation be done via teledoc oh yeah I
don’t know yeah talk to your clinician about that I don’t know if you want to bring that on but absolutely it doesn’t
seem like you have to be in the clinic very often but I mean yeah your clinician can address that for you
there’s no set time frame that you need to be here in order to work with this but if you certainly are interested in
it I’m sure that your clinician will bring on those conversations I hope that answers your question
um do we have to also buy a smartphone that’s a good question too good question
um if if you don’t utilize the smartphone you could still use this uh
you just would not be able to get the lifetime uh the the real-time feedback
and data which is a huge Advantage but you could still do this for different
periods of time and and then your clinician could review those reports uh
reports with you um I see a question about does the aura ring also do this there are quite a
number of uh wearables that are are utilizing the science of heart rate
variability I would say one of the major advantages of first speed is that it’s
it’s medical grade it’s professional grade data most of the other uh
wearables whether they’re various fitbits uh or aura rings I think these
can be very useful for for long-term use uh I think the the first speed device
being medical grade gives us probably the best quality data you know for a
period of time uh in which the individual is learning about their bodies their patterns of stress and and
recovery and how to modify uh those um those things
okay I’m going down here sorry I lost that view um confused our clinician where at
Maxwell Clinic okay or with first beat folks okay so a question we were
confusing uh one of our listeners the clinician we’re talking about is yes yes
um that would be ordering and reviewing your first beat yeah yes and I think one
last question um if someone buys a smartphone need a near field device probably I had to buy
one to use my continuous glucose monitor not all smartphones have the near field
I don’t know if you’re familiar with near field I think that’s what I’m gathering here maybe the first beat
doesn’t but if it does the patient needs to know this so they don’t waste money
on the wrong model trying to save money um the the the the the first speed life
uh there’s an app that you download uh from wherever you download apps and
there’s no charge separate charge for downloading that that app uh it syncs
using Bluetooth technology with the monitoring device so um I’m not familiar with the field
field yeah your field um I’m not that technologically savvy
but uh yeah I I don’t see uh I don’t see a problem anybody with uh either an
Android or an iPhone uh smartphone would be able to download that app and utilize
the app but yet you don’t have to use a phone at all you wouldn’t have to I mean most people have and use smartphones
right so if they do then most people will probably want access to the the
live data but uh we anticipate we’re in the final stages of getting this um
rolled out and activated so it we we anticipate being able to um to issue it
to patients in the very near future so I’m very excited because I think this brings to the table a real significant
portfolio of amazing things to help hormonally Challenge and dysfunctional patients hormones can be sneaky they can
be things that we don’t always know how to manage and so um yeah PCOS
endometriosis these are really hardcore nasty hormonal dysfunctional chronic
diseases that these types of tools I feel very strongly need to be applied so um thank
you yeah you’re welcome to your information and thank you everybody for listening certain if there’s additional
questions please let us know and we’ll do our best to get back to you okay have a great rest of your day everyone bye
for now take care
