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How Much Sleep Do You Really Need?

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How much sleep do you really need? Probably a lot less than you think, says one expert. It’s well known that a good night’s sleep is essential for health. But oversleeping has been linked to a host of medical problems, including:

Diabetes: In a study of almost 9,000 Americans, researchers found a relationship between sleep and the risk of diabetes. People who slept more than nine hours each night had a 50 percent greater risk of diabetes than people who slept seven hours per night. This increased risk was also seen in people who slept less than five hours per night.

Obesity: Sleeping too much could make you weigh too much, as well. One recent study showed that people who slept for nine or 10 hours every night were 21 percent more likely to become obese over a six-year period.

Headaches: Sleeping longer than usual can cause head pain. Researchers believe this is due to the effect oversleeping has on certain neurotransmitters in the brain, including serotonin. People who sleep too much during the day and disrupt their nighttime sleep may also find themselves suffering from headaches in the morning.

Back pain: There was a time when doctors told people suffering from back pain to head straight to bed. But those days are long gone — they now recommend against sleeping more than usual, when possible.

Depression: Roughly 15 percent of people with depression sleep too much. This may in turn make their depression worse, because regular sleep habits are important to the recovery process. In fact, in certain instances, sleep deprivation can be an effective treatment for depression.

Heart disease: A careful analysis of the data from the Nurses’ Health Study, which involved nearly 72,000 women, showed that women who slept nine to 11 hours per night were 38 percent more likely to have coronary heart disease.

Death: Multiple studies have found that people who sleep nine or more hours a night have significantly higher death rates. No specific reason for this correlation has been determined.

Meanwhile, the common assertion that you need eight or more hours of sleep each night may be incorrect. According to some experts, most people need less than eight hours of sleep each night. Several large studies over the past 40 years show that the average healthy adult sleeps for seven to seven-and-a-half hours a night, and that should be plenty from a physical perspective. Some adults need even less than that and can function normally on just five hours of sleep a night.

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News on Health & Science

Sleepless Night Can Trigger Disorders

Just one sleepless night can trigger the key cellular pathway that produces tissue-damaging inflammation, a new study has found.

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During the study, the researchers measured the levels of nuclear factor (NF)-?B, a transcription factor that serves a vital role in the body’s inflammatory signalling, in adults.

These measurements were repeatedly assessed, including in the morning after baseline (or normal) sleep, after partial sleep deprivation (where the volunteers were awake from 11 pm to 3:00 am), and after recovery sleep.

The assessment showed that in the morning after sleep loss, activation of NF-?B signalling was significantly greater than after baseline or recovery sleep, although they found this increase in inflammatory response in only the female subjects.

The researchers said that the new findings suggest a good night’s sleep can ease the risk of both heart disease and autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis.

“The closer that we look at sleep, the more that we learn about the benefits of sleeping. In this case, Irwin and colleagues provide evidence that sleep deprivation is associated with enhancement of pro-inflammatory processes in the body,” said John H. Krystal, M.D., Editor of Biological Psychiatry and affiliated with both Yale University School of Medicine and the VA Connecticut Healthcare System.

“Our findings suggest even modest sleep loss may play a role in common disorders that affect sweeping segments of the population.” In other words, sleep is vitally important to maintaining a healthy body,” said Dr. Irwin, lead author and director of the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the Semel Institute.

“These findings provide a potential mechanistic avenue through which addressing sleep disturbance might improve health,” Krystal added.

A report appears in the September 15th issue of Biological Psychiatry.

Sources: The Times Of India

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WHY CORNER

Why Do Some People Sleepwalk?

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Sleepwalking or somnambulism runs in families, indicating a genetic component. Studies show that it is also associated with sleep deprivation, fever, stress and intake of drugs, especially sedatives, hypnotics, antipsychotics, stimulants and antihistamines. Somnambulism occurs because normal physiological systems are active even at inappropriate times. Why the brain issues commands to the muscles during certain phases of sleep is not known, but these commands are usually suppressed by other neurological mechanisms. At times this suppression can be incomplete and actions that normally occur during wakefulness emerge in sleep.

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In children, it is believed to be related to fatigue, prior sleep loss or anxiety. Children, mostly aged six to 12 years, are afflicted, perhaps because they spend more time in the “deep sleep” phase of slumber.

Physical activity happens only during the non-rapid eye movement (NREM) cycle of deep sleep, which precedes the dreaming state of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. During this phase, the body releases a chemical that paralyses the body. However, sleepwalkers do not have this chemical trigger, hence the behaviour. With several cycles of non-REM and REM sleep in a night, sleepwalking occurs mostly during deep non-REM sleep early in the night or near morning.

In adults, sleepwalking is associated with a disorder of the mind but may also be seen with reactions to drugs and/or medications and alcohol, and medical conditions like partial complex seizures. In the elderly, it may be indicative of an organic brain syndrome, REM behaviour disorders or a personality disturbance.

Sources: The Telegraph (Kolkata, India)

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Less Sleep Makes You Obese

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No matter which part of the world you live in, if you don’t get enough of sleep, there’s a fair chance you are going to put on weight, states a new study.

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What’s more is that it doesn’t matter if you’re an adult or a child.

In one of the first studies to observe cross-sectional relationships between duration of sleep and obesity in both children and adults, researchers have discovered a consistent increased risk of obesity among short sleepers.

The study, led by Francesco P Cappuccio, MD, of Warwick Medical School in the United Kingdom, involved an orderly search of publications on the relationship between short sleep duration and obesity risk.

Of the 696 studies, the researchers short-listed 12 studies on children and 17 studies on adults based on the inclusion criteria. This involved report of duration of sleep as exposure, body mass index (BMI) as continuous outcome and prevalence of obesity as categorical outcome, number of participants, age and gender.

In children, the study included 13 population samples from the 12 studies, representing 30,002 participants aged between two to 20 years, and found that 7 of 11 studies showed a significant link between short sleep duration and obesity.

In case of adults, 22 population samples from the 17 studies were included that meant a total of 604,509 participants aged between 15-102 years. It was discovered that 17 population samples showed a significant association between short duration of sleep and obesity.

In fact, all studies in adults showed a consistent and significant negative association between hours of sleep and BMI, quite unlike studies in children.

Cappuccio said that this study showed a consistent pattern of increased odds of being a short sleeper if you are obese, both in childhood and adulthood.

“By appraising the world literature, we were able to show some heterogeneity amongst studies in the world. However, there is a striking consistent overall association, in that both obese children and adults had a significantly increased risk of being short sleepers compared to normal weight individuals. The size of the association was comparable (1.89-fold increase in children and 1.55-fold increase in adults),” said Dr Cappuccio.

He added: “This study is important as it confirms that this association is strong and might be of public health relevance. However, it also raises the unanswered question yet of whether this is a cause-effect association. Only prospective longitudinal studies will be able to address the outstanding question.”

Click to see also :->Lack of Sleep and Obesity

Lack of sleep ‘makes you fatter’

New Weight Loss Prescription
Sources: The Times Of India

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Healthy Tips

How to Achieve Deep, Uninterrupted Sleep

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Americans now get about 25 percent less sleep than they did a century ago. This isn’t just a matter of fatigue, it causes serious damage to your body.

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Sleep deprivation can alter your levels of thyroid and stress hormones, which play a part in everything from your memory and immune system to your heart and metabolism. Over time, lack of sleep can lead to:

  • Weight gain
  • Depression
  • High blood sugar levels and an increased risk of diabetes
  • Brain damage

Fortunately, there are many steps you can take to get the sleep your body craves. Here are 10 to start with (and the link below has 14 more):

1. Sprinkle just-washed sheets and pillowcases with lavender water, and then iron them before making your bed. The scent is proven to promote relaxation.

2. Hide your clock, so that its glow won’t disturb you and make sure there is no light coming from other sources including your windows as this will seriously impair your body’s ability to produce melatonin.

3. Choose the right pillow — neck pillows, which resemble a rectangle with a depression in the middle, can enhance the quality of your sleep and reduce neck pain.

4. Paint your bedroom sage green, or another soothing color, which will provide a visual reminder of sleep.

5. Move your bed away from outside walls, which will help cut down on noise.

6. Kick your dog or cat out of your bedroom — studies have shown that they snore!

7. Take a hot bath 90 to 120 minutes before bedtime; it increases your core body temperature, and when it abruptly drops when you get out of the bath, it signals your body that you are ready for sleep.

8. Keep a notepad at your bedside — if you wake in the middle of the night with your mind going, you can transfer your to-do list to the page and return to sleep unworried.

9. Put heavier curtains over your windows –– even the barely noticeable light from streetlights, a full moon, or your neighbor’s house can interfere with the circadian rhythm changes you need to fall asleep.

10. Eat a handful of walnuts before bed — they’re a good source of tryptophan, a sleep-enhancing amino acid.

Sources:

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