Deep sleep lowers blood pressure

Endocrinologist Felix Beuschlein is working on an innovative approach for treating high blood pressure, literally overnight, by subjecting patients to sounds in deep sleep. His research could help many of those affected in Switzerland reduce their medication.

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When 59-year-old René Zwygart* went to the doctor for a check-up he certainly hadn’t reckoned with having to take tablets for the rest of his life. He felt healthy, and only climbing the stairs left him short of breath. That’s what’s so treacherous about high blood pressure: “For a long time it doesn’t give you any symptoms. But if it’s not treated, in the long term it can lead to problems like a heart attack or stroke,” says Felix Beuschlein, senior physician and director of the Department of Endocrinology, Diabetology and Clinical Nutrition at University Hospital Zurich (USZ). Beuschlein does research into hormone-related conditions, including hormonal high blood pressure (hypertension).

It’s a dangerous scenario confronting many people in Switzerland: the blood is pumped through the arteries at too high a pressure in every fourth adult; from age 70, when the blood vessels are no longer so elastic, it even affects every second person. The standard therapy for high blood pressure includes diet, exercise, and drugs – often with side-effects such as coughing, circulation problems or impotence.

Felix Beuschlein hopes that in the future it will be possible to reduce people’s blood pressure while they’re in deep sleep, the phase where biological functions including blood pressure are regulated: “The body produces fewer stress hormones, the activity of the nervous system slows down, and heart rate and blood pressure fall,” explains Beuschlein. This “deep-dive” also means people’s blood pressure is lower the next day.

For this reason Felix Beuschlein wants to prolong the deep sleep phase with a novel wearable headset. During deep sleep, patients are played a quiet murmuring sound through the headphones, which doesn’t wake them up and has been shown to extend the phase. The headset incorporates a measuring instrument that monitors for the large, slow brainwaves of deep sleep to trigger the audio signal at the right moment.

“The effect of the sounds on these slow waves is measured, and a self-learning program adjusts the stimulation to the patient on an ongoing basis,” explains Felix Beuschlein. The device was developed by Walter Karlen, who heads the Mobile Health Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, for an interdisciplinary medical innovation project called SleepLoop. Felix Beuschlein is running clinical trials with the new equipment with the support of a donation from the Iten Kohaut Foundation to the USZ Foundation.

He hopes that in a few years it will be possible to treat hypertension using a headset, so that people like René Zwygart can reduce their blood pressure at home − ideally completely without medication.

*anonymized

60% financed

Iten Kohaut Foundation