sleep category
In the heat, the dream that I was chasing
Hot flashes are a symptom of the changing hormone levels that are considered to be characteristic of menopause.
Hot flashes are typically experienced as a feeling of intense heat with sweating and rapid heartbeat, and may typically last from two to thirty minutes for each occurrence. The sensation of heat usually begins in the face or face and chest, although it may appear elsewhere such as the back of the neck, and it can spread throughout the whole body. Some women pass out if the effects are strong enough. In addition to being an internal sensation, the surface of the skin, especially on the face, becomes hot to the touch.
It has been speculated that hot flashes are considerably less common among Asian women, possibly due to their diets.
Hot flashes in men could be a possible sign of low testosterone.
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A new study finds that women in midlife underreport the number of hot flashes that they experience by more than 40 percent, and these hot flashes are linked to poor verbal memory.
photo { Alex Prager }
related { Birds kill siblings, hormones blamed }
Everyone wants to know how it is going to end
In 2002, Daniel Kripke, co-director of research at the Scripps Clinic Sleep Center in La Jolla, Calif. compared death rates among more than 1 million American adults who, as part of a study on cancer prevention, reported their average nightly amount of sleep.
Studies show that people who sleep between 6.5 hours and 7.5 hours a night, as they report, live the longest. And people who sleep 8 hours or more, or less than 6.5 hours, they don’t live quite as long.
There is just as much risk associated with sleeping too long as with sleeping too short.
artwork { Boticelli, Venus and Mars, 1483 }
There is no cure for sleep
For decades, people suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome have struggled to convince doctors, employers, friends and even family members that they were not imagining their debilitating symptoms. Skeptics called the illness “yuppie flu” and “shirker syndrome.”
But the syndrome is now finally gaining some official respect. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which in 1999 acknowledged that it had diverted millions of dollars allocated by Congress for chronic fatigue syndrome research to other programs, has released studies that linked the condition to genetic mutations and abnormalities in gene expression involved in key physiological processes. (…)
Some scientists and many patients remain highly critical of the C.D.C.’s record on chronic fatigue syndrome. But nearly everyone now agrees that the syndrome is real.
Don’t eat, don’t sleep, don’t waste a second of it
Adjusting meal times can help travellers recover from jet lag, a study suggests.
Harvard University researchers believe the brain has a second “feeding clock” which keeps track of meal-times, rather than daytime, after studying mice.
When food is scarce, the feeding clock overrides the master clock, keeping animals awake until they find food.
Thus, shift workers and travellers can keep tiredness at bay by not eating, they suggest in the journal Science.
Our daily sleep cycles, behaviour and metabolism are governed by a powerful master clock, which resides in an area of the brain known as the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
Disruption of these “circadian” rhythms have been shown to be linked with insomnia, depression, heart disease, cancer and neurodegenerative disorders.
This “circadian” clock is highly sensitive to daylight. But scientists have for several years been aware of a second “feeding” clock which is sensitive to our eating patterns.
There’s a blur drizzle down the plateglass as a neon swizzle stick stirrin up the sultry night air
Twenty percent of American workers are night-shift workers, and the number is growing by about 3% per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the rest of society sleeps, police officers, security guards, truck drivers, office cleaning crews, hotel desk clerks, nurses, pilots and many others keep patients alive, streets safe and packages moving. But at a price.
These workers — and people with more conventionally sleep-deprived lifestyles — are known to be at higher risk for accidents, sleep disorders and psychological stress due to daytime demands, such as family and other obligations, that interfere with sleeping. Now scientific evidence suggests their disrupted circadian rhythms may also cause a kind of biological revolt, raising their likelihood of obesity, cancer, reproductive health problems, mental illness and gastrointestinal disorders.
The evidence for an increased cancer risk is so compelling that, in December, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a unit of the World Health Organization, declared that shift work is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
photo { Nikola Tamindzic }
I’m so jetlagged, sometimes I even forget to be sexy
Sleep is such a fundamental biological drive that it’s shared by practically every species, from fruit flies to humans. Indeed, sleep is so essential that animals will die as quickly from sleep deprivation as they will from food deprivation. And yet despite such alarming evidence (not to mention all the things your mother told you about the importance of sleep), human beings are one of the few species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep.
Why do we do this? Most would blame the frantic pace of modern life: we live in a 24/7 world, fuelled by ever-present deadlines, demands and responsibilities. With so much to do and so little time, it seems tempting, or perhaps even necessary, to shave off a few hours of sleep in order to get things done. Given this chronic shortage of shuteye, wouldn’t it be wonderful if a quick nap could refresh us mentally and improve our memories? Results from a recent study by Lahl et al. (2008) suggest that a mere six-minute nap may be able do just that.
I wanna get into it, man, you know, like a like a sex machine man, movin’ and doin’ it, you know, can I count it off? One, two, three, four!
Restless legs syndrome (RLS) is a neurological disorder characterized by unpleasant sensations in the legs and an uncontrollable urge to move when at rest in an effort to relieve these feelings. RLS sensations are often described by people as burning, creeping, tugging, or like insects crawling inside the legs. Often called paresthesias (abnormal sensations) or dysesthesias (unpleasant abnormal sensations), the sensations range in severity from uncomfortable to irritating to painful.
The most distinctive or unusual aspect of the condition is that lying down and trying to relax activates the symptoms. As a result, most people with RLS have difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep. Left untreated, the condition causes exhaustion and daytime fatigue. Many people with RLS report that their job, personal relations, and activities of daily living are strongly affected as a result of their exhaustion. They are often unable to concentrate, have impaired memory, or fail to accomplish daily tasks.
Some researchers estimate that RLS affects as many as 12 million Americans. However, others estimate a much higher occurrence because RLS is thought to be underdiagnosed and, in some cases, misdiagnosed.
More than 80 percent of people with RLS also experience a more common condition known as periodic limb movement disorder (PLMD). PLMD is characterized by involuntary leg twitching or jerking movements during sleep that typically occur every 10 to 60 seconds, sometimes throughout the night. The symptoms cause repeated awakening and severely disrupted sleep.
It’s going to be a bumpy night, tell her to buckle down for the ride of her life
For almost two decades, Philip Skeates woke up dog tired, even though he had just spent a good 12 hours in bed. (…) To the amazement of experts, he was diagnosed with one of the worst cases of sleep apnoea - a condition that causes the airways to close - that had ever been seen in Britain.
It meant that Skeates stopped breathing every 40 seconds or so during the night. He would briefly wake up, without properly regaining consciousness, and then fall back to sleep. And the process would begin over again.
Doctors estimated Skeates was only actually sleeping for a few seconds at a time, and for less than 15 minutes in total every night.
Alive 24/7
In what sounds like a dream for millions of tired coffee drinkers, Darpa-funded scientists might have found a drug that will eliminate sleepiness.
A nasal spray containing a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests. The discovery’s first application will probably be in treatment of the severe sleep disorder narcolepsy. (…)
Orexin A is a promising candidate to become a “sleep replacement” drug. For decades, stimulants have been used to combat sleepiness, but they can be addictive and often have side effects, including raising blood pressure or causing mood swings. (…)
“New research indicates that not getting enough sleep is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders,” said Dr. Michael Twery, director of the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research. “We have to realize that we are already living in a society where we are already self-medicating with caffeine,” he said.
photo { Square America }
Zombies and the undead
Research shows that teenagers’ body clocks are set to a schedule that is different from that of younger children or adults. This prevents adolescents from dropping off until around 11 p.m., when they produce the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, and waking up much before 8 a.m. when their bodies stop producing melatonin. The result is that the first class of the morning is often a waste, with as many as 28 percent of students falling asleep, according to a National Sleep Foundation poll. Some are so sleepy they don’t even show up, contributing to failure and dropout rates.
In 2002, high schools in Jessamine County in Kentucky pushed back the first bell to 8:40 a.m., from 7:30 a.m. Attendance immediately went up, as did scores on standardized tests, which have continued to rise each year. Districts in Virginia and Connecticut have achieved similar success. In Minneapolis and Edina, Minn., which instituted high school start times of 8:40 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. respectively in 1997, students’ grades rose slightly and lateness, behavioral problems and dropout rates decreased.
