Brandie Weikle · CBC News The strains of worry and upended routine during the COVID-19 crisis aren't exactly helping people sleep well at night. You or someone you love may be battling the novel coronavirus, or your employment may have been blown up by business shutdowns and stay-home directives. You're juggling health care with child care and cabin fever. Even if you're healthy and gainfully employed, pandemic living isn't easy. "Everyone's routine is being disrupted. It's a severely stressful event," said Dr. Atul Khullar, an Edmonton psychiatrist and senior consultant for MedSleep, a group of sleep clinics. This provokes anxiety and stress, exacerbating any pre-existing mental health and insomnia problems, or causing new ones, he said. "And for some people it can be very traumatizing. They're facing losing their livelihoods. They're faced with losing their way of life. Notwithstanding that your kids are home. It's just stressor after stressor after stressor." This isn't the stuff of which sweet dreams are made. If you're a parent wondering how to talk to your kids about the coronavirus, here's a video that'll help start the conversation. 1:27 Whether or not you're occupied at any given moment with the task or activity in front of you, below the surface remains the psychological weight of being in unprecedented and life-altering times, said Khullar. "It's kind of this dull ache for a lot of people, and you can only ignore it so much." ©2020 CBC/Radio-Canada

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 27171 - Posted: 04.06.2020

By Adam Popescu Many people spend their nights now tossing and turning, struggling to unglue from the constant scroll of coronavirus news updates. But, while there is no body or life hack to make you impervious to the touch of disease, we do know that sleep is key to helping our bodies stay healthy. “Sleep is an essential part of protection from and response to any infection,” said Douglas B. Kirsch, a neurologist and former president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. But still, he hears you: “Sleep is hard when anxiety levels are high, such as in the case of a pandemic.” There are some answers as to what you can do now. You may not like them. Create and maintain a very consistent sleep practice and schedule that works for you. The more consistent your wake-up time, the more consistent your body functions. The National Sleep Foundation recommends sticking to a sleep schedule, and here’s a simple way to do it: Set a regular bedtime. Pair it with a set time to wake. (As many people aren’t currently commuting, this might be easier than normal.) Set yourself up for success by doing the little things: use blackout curtains if you’re sleeping while it’s bright, ditto to earplugs or a sleep mask (Wirecutter, a company owned by The New York Times that judges products, recommends this sleep mask, but even a light pillow or T-shirt works in a pinch). No matter what you do, make your bedroom very comfortable and very dark. Are you easily awakened? Use a fan or a repeated track on Spotify for white noise. Still, if you’re tired, get sleep while you can. “If you’re tired during the day, get your rest then,” said Janet Mullington, a professor in the department of neurology at Harvard Medical School. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 27144 - Posted: 03.27.2020

By Allison Hirschlag Everyone likes a good nap now and then, right? Whether you nod off during a boring movie, or rest your head on your desk at work for 20 minutes or so to fight the afternoon slump, naps can revitalize you in a major way. One study even showed they can boost performance and memory regulation better than caffeine. This all sounds great in theory, but many people — myself included — find naps do the opposite. I wake up from naps feeling like I’m in the throes of a New Year’s Day-strength hangover. It takes me at least 20 minutes to recover from them, and I never end up seeing any of the benefits. Even when I timed my nap to be no more than 30 minutes — the nap length sleep experts claim is the most beneficial — I came out of it certain I was experiencing the early stages of the flu (I wasn’t). Naturally, I’ve always been a little jealous of the people who take naps and wake up feeling like a million bucks. I’m a healthy, youngish, childless woman who regularly sleeps seven to eight hours a night — why don’t naps work for me? The short answer is that some adults are genetically predisposed to need more hours of continuous sleep than others (I’m leaving children out of this because, as growing bodies, they naturally need more sleep). According to a study by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, at least 80 genes appear to be involved in sleep regulation, which “suggests that sleep duration in natural populations can be influenced by a wide variety of biological processes.” Simply put, sleep duration needs vary considerably because they’re based on a broad spectrum of genetic differences.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 27105 - Posted: 03.09.2020

By Laura Sanders Here’s something neat about sleeping sheep: Their brains have fast zags of neural activity, similar to those found in sleeping people. Here’s something even neater: These bursts zip inside awake sheep’s brains, too. These spindles haven’t been spotted in healthy, awake people’s brains. But the sheep findings, published March 2 in eNeuro, raise that possibility. The purpose of sleep spindles, which look like jagged bursts of electrical activity on an electroencephalogram, isn’t settled. One idea is that these bursts help lock new memories into the brain during sleep. Daytime ripples, if they exist in people, might be doing something similar during periods of wakefulness, the researchers speculate. Jenny Morton, a neurobiologist at the University of Cambridge, and her colleagues studied six female merino sheep with implanted electrodes that spanned their brains. The team collected electrical patterns that emerged over two nights and a day. As the sheep slept, sleep spindles raced across their brains. These spindles are akin to those in people during non-REM sleep, which accounts for the bulk of an adult’s sleeping night (SN: 8/10/10). But the electrodes also caught spindles during the day, when the sheep were clearly awake. These “wake” spindles “looked different from those we saw at night,” Morton says, with different densities, for instance. Overall, these spindles were also less abundant and more localized, captured at single, unpredictable spots in the sheep’s brains. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2020.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 27089 - Posted: 03.03.2020

By Rachel Cericola A year ago, I was diagnosed with nasal polyps and regularly snored like a wild boar. I’ve had the polyps removed, but the snoring continues. I’m not alone. According to Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine (Fifth Edition), “about 40 percent of the adult population” snores. Sometimes my snoring wakes up my husband (and vice versa), so I decided to try out six popular over-the-counter anti-snoring contraptions. To get a baseline measurement of how much I was snoring without any intervention, I used SnoreLab, a highly rated app that listens for snoring sounds, records clips, and analyzes your resting audio. After calculating an average of four nights’ intervention-free snoring readings to get a starting “sleep score,” I then slept with each anti-snoring device for several nights and tracked my SnoreLab results against that baseline. (Note that some of these devices may work for you and not me — and none of them should be used to treat sleep apnea. If you’re having restless sleep, gasping awake, or even feeling tired and foggy in the daytime, see a doctor.) While longer-term testing is needed before we could confidently recommend any of these, a few devices showed promise in our preliminary — and far from scientific — trials. Here’s how they did, in order of how much I found they helped: Smart Nora, $329 at the time of publication This system will slightly move your head when it catches you snoring. It includes a wireless, mic-equipped device that can sit bedside or be wall-mounted to detect snoring. Once it does that, it communicates with an under-bed base station that pumps air through a tube to an insert that lives inside your pillow. That motion gently adjusts your head position to reduce snoring (in my case, it effectively did so without waking me up). It sounds bizarre, but this was actually the most effective device I tried, cutting my total snoring in half, according to my SnoreLab sleep scores. It is also the most expensive. There are many options for personalization, which we will continue to test. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 27052 - Posted: 02.20.2020

Shannon Bond If you're having a hard time falling asleep, that sleep tracker on your wrist might be to blame. And there's a name for this new kind of insomnia of the digital age: orthosomnia. It's "when you just really become fixated on having this perfect sleep via tracker," said Seema Khosla, medical director at the North Dakota Center for Sleep. "And then you start worrying about it, and you wind up giving yourself insomnia." Sleep trackers have become increasingly popular. They come in the form of watches, wristbands, rings and even mattresses. The gadgets measure how you breathe, how fast your heart is beating, how much you're tossing and turning. They crunch that data to produce a sleep score, usually through a smartphone app. But in an irony of our digital lifestyles, for some people, perfecting that sleep score becomes an end unto itself — so much so that they can lose sleep over it. Khosla sees this is her own practice as a sleep doctor. Stressed-out patients complain they are aiming for a sleep score of 100 but are getting only 80. It keeps them up at night. She has a simple solution. "I'll ask them just to put their tracker away for a couple of weeks. And honestly, sometimes you can just see the relief on their faces," she said. Kathrin Hamm experienced this problem firsthand. She was traveling around the world as an economist for the World Bank, and getting good sleep was a priority. © 2020 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 27043 - Posted: 02.18.2020

By Elizabeth Pennisi Scientists seeking the origins of sleep may have uncovered important clues in the Australian bearded dragon. By tracing sleep-related neural signals to a specific region of the lizard’s brain—and linking that region to a mysterious part of the mammalian brain—a new study suggests complex sleep evolved even earlier in vertebrate evolution than researchers thought. The work could ultimately shed light on the mechanisms behind sleep—and pave the way for studies that may help humans get a better night’s rest. “Answers to the questions raised and reframed by this research seem extremely likely to be significant in many ways, including clinically,” says Stephen Smith, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute who was not involved with the new study. Mammals and birds have two kinds of sleep. During rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, eyes flutter, electrical activity moves through the brain, and, in humans, dreaming occurs. In between REM episodes is “slow wave” sleep, when brain activity ebbs and electrical activity synchronizes. This less intense brain state may help form and store memories, a few studies have suggested. In 2016, Gilles Laurent, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, discovered that reptiles, too, have both kinds of sleep. Every 40 seconds, central bearded dragons (Pogona vitticeps) switch between the two sleep states, he and his colleagues reported. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 27037 - Posted: 02.13.2020

By Jade Wu Savvy Psychologist This week, let’s ask the million-dollar question: How much sleep do you really need? We all know sleep is important. Shakespeare called it the “sore labor’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast.” Less poetically, headlines these days seem to be shouting: “Sleep deprivation will make you slower and dumber!” “It will give you Alzheimer's disease and heart attacks!” One mattress advertisement I saw simply said, “You can only live seven days without sleep.” Yikes. Talk about pressure to perform! Fear-mongering aside, there is good evidence that sleep is important for health, well-being, and performance. A recent meta-analysis including over 1600 participants confirmed that sleep restriction is associated with poorer attention and thinking. We’ve known for decades that sleep deprivation disrupts mood. For example, it can trigger manic episodes in those with bipolar disorder. And we’re learning now, from researchers in Sweden and Germany, that insufficient sleep can even affect the microbiota in your gut. But how much sleep is enough? Is there such a thing as too much sleep? If you ask Dr. Google, you’ll get over a billion answers. (That’s right; “billion” with a “b.”) The most common answer seems to be “eight hours.” That seems pretty straightforward. But where does this number come from? And if you’re thinking, “Dr. Google hasn’t examined me; how would she know how much sleep I need,” then you’re asking exactly the right question. © 2020 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 26977 - Posted: 01.22.2020

By Philippa Roxby Health reporter A sleep disorder that can leave people gasping for breath at night could be linked to the amount of fat on their tongues, a study suggests. When sleep apnoea patients lost weight, it was the reduction in tongue fat that lay behind the resulting improvements, researchers said. Larger and fattier tongues are more common among obese patients. But the Pennsylvania team said other people with fatty tongues may also be at risk of the sleep disorder. The researchers now plan to work out which low-fat diets are particularly good at slimming down the tongue. Tongue tied "You talk, eat and breathe with your tongue - so why is fat deposited there?" said study author Dr Richard Schwab, of Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia. "It's not clear why - it could be genetic or environmental - but the less fat there is, the less likely the tongue is to collapse during sleep." Sleep apnoea is a common disorder that can cause loud snoring, noisy breathing and jerky movements when asleep. It can also cause sleepiness during the day, which can affect quality of life. The most common type is obstructive sleep apnoea, in which the upper airway gets partly or completely blocked during sleep. Those who are overweight or who have a large neck or tonsils are more likely to have the condition. Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, scanned 67 people with obstructive sleep apnoea who were obese and had lost 10% of their body weight, improving their symptoms improved by 30%. © 2020 BBC.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 26946 - Posted: 01.10.2020

By Matthew Hutson When you are stuck on a problem, sometimes it is best to stop thinking about it—consciously, anyway. Research has shown that taking a break or a nap can help the brain create pathways to a solution. Now a new study expands on the effect of this so-called incubation by using sound cues to focus the sleeping mind on a targeted problem. When humans sleep, parts of the brain replay certain memories, strengthening and transforming them. About a decade ago researchers developed a technique, called targeted memory reactivation (TMR), aimed at further reinforcing selected memories: when a sound becomes associated with a memory and is later played during sleep, that memory gets reactivated. In a study published last November in Psychological Science, scientists tested whether revisiting the memory of a puzzle during sleep might also improve problem-solving. About 60 participants visited the laboratory before and after a night of sleep. In an evening session, they attempted spatial, verbal and conceptual puzzles, with a distinct music clip repeating in the background for each, until they had worked on six puzzles they could not solve. Overnight they wore electrodes to detect slow-wave sleep—slumber's deepest phase, which may be important for memory consolidation—and a device played the sounds assigned to three of the six unsolved puzzles. The next day, back at the lab, the participants attempted the six puzzles again. (Each repeated the experiment with a different set of puzzles the following night.) All told, the subjects solved 32 percent of the sound-prompted puzzles versus 21 percent of the untargeted puzzles—a boost of more than 50 percent. © 2020 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 26938 - Posted: 01.07.2020

Getting a Good Night’s Sleep Without Drugs By Jane E. Brody As many as 20 percent to 30 percent of people in the general population sleep poorly. They may have difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, some awaken much too early, while others do not feel rested despite spending a full night seemingly asleep in bed. For one person in 10, insomnia is a chronic problem that repeats itself night after night. Little wonder that so many resort to sleeping pills to cope with it. But experts report that there are better, safer and more long-lasting alternatives than prescription drugs to treat this common problem. The alternatives are especially valuable for older people who metabolize drugs more slowly, are more likely to have treatable underlying causes of their insomnia and are more susceptible to adverse side effects of medications. Is Your Sleep Cycle Out of Sync? It May Be Genetic By Jane E. Brody Early to bed, early to rise — a fine plan for a dairy farmer who has to get up long before dawn to milk the cows. But if you’re someone who works all day with stocks and clients and may want to enjoy an evening out now and then, it would be better not to be getting up at 2 a.m. and have to struggle to stay awake through dinner or a show. Such is the challenge faced by a friend who has what sleep specialists call an advanced sleep phase. Her biological sleep-wake cycle, or circadian rhythm, is out of sync with the demands of the modern world. Read more>>> By Perri Klass, M.D. The biology of adolescent sleep reflects a natural and normal delay in melatonin secretion that leads to a later sleep onset time, which unfortunately coincides with early high school start times, creating a high-stress set up. Pediatricians often see adolescents with insomnia, who have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, waking up too early or finding sleep not restful or refreshing. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 26919 - Posted: 12.27.2019

Alejandra Manjarrez When he was a postdoc at KU Leuven in Belgium, Daniel Vigo helped analyze results from an experiment that simulated a spaceflight to Mars. Six crew members were secluded in an artificially lit, spacecraft-like facility for 520 days starting in June 2010. Part of an international project known as the Mars500 mission, the experiment aimed to assess the psychological, social, and biological effects of prolonged confinement and isolation, along with the absence of normal day and night rhythms. That isolation, of course, was just an illusion, manufactured by the Institute for Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the European Space Agency. The simulation took place in central Moscow, where any sudden medical problems could have received immediate attention—as Vigo, now a researcher at the Catholic University of Argentina and a member of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), tells The Scientist in Spanish. He began wondering what would happen in a less artificial scenario. One of the key findings from the study, for example, was that confinement—in this case in an artificially lit building—disrupted normal sleep patterns: the crew members in the Mars500 experiment had suffered from sleep problems and rapidly fell into sleep-wake routines that were out of sync with one another. But what would the story be like for people experiencing a similarly extreme living environment, Vigo wondered, without the safety net provided by a carefully controlled simulation? © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 26918 - Posted: 12.27.2019

By Nicholas Bakalar The right diet might help you sleep better. In a study of 77,860 postmenopausal women, researchers found that consuming foods that had a low glycemic index is associated with a reduced risk for insomnia. Foods with low glycemic indexes — for example, vegetables, nuts and whole grain breads — have carbohydrates that are slowly absorbed and cause lower, and slower, rises in blood glucose and insulin levels after being consumed. For this study, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, participants completed lengthy questionnaires about what foods they ate and how often. They also reported their degree of insomnia at the start of the study and after three years of follow-up. Compared with the one-fifth of participants whose diet had the lowest glycemic index, those with the highest were 11 percent more likely to have insomnia. Some low-glycemic index foods — whole grains and dairy foods, for example — were not associated with reduced insomnia. But people who ate the most fruits and vegetables were about 14 percent less likely to have insomnia, and the largest consumers of fiber were 13 percent less likely. In contrast, women who ate the most refined grains had a 16 percent higher risk of insomnia than those who ate the least. Although the study controlled for many health and behavioral characteristics, the study showed only an association and could not prove cause and effect. “Randomized controlled trials examining dietary patterns in relation to insomnia are needed to clarify these findings,” the authors write. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 26917 - Posted: 12.27.2019

By Aaron E. Carroll and Austin Frakt Both of us have sleep apnea, and both of us receive treatment that makes a world of difference. It could make a big difference in your life, too. Sleep apnea is quite common, with estimates that it affects up to 17 percent of men 50 to 70, and 10 percent of men 30 to 49. But there’s a problem. In the American health system, we often make it hard for people to get care, and the same is true here. Obstructive sleep apnea is when the upper airway collapses during sleep, leading to periods of, well, not breathing. About 24 million Americans have sleep apnea and don’t know it, research suggests, and many who do know don’t get treatment. The consequences can be severe. It’s a leading cause of vehicle accidents, as apnea-afflicted drivers fall asleep behind the wheel. Snoring and sleep apnea are on the same spectrum and are associated with Type 2 diabetes in adults. Treatment is associated with improvements in insulin resistance. Having sleep apnea, and not treating it, increases the risk of postoperative cardiovascular surgery complications. Treating sleep apnea improves sleep duration and quality. People who sleep better are much happier and healthier in general. Reducing snoring also helps partners sleep better. How hard is it to get used to a mask? We were treated with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). It’s intrusive, though not nearly as much as we had feared. Each night we strap on masks connected to CPAP machines. The modern machines are silent. And we both use masks that cover only our nostrils, though others need full face masks. The air that the machines push through the masks keeps our airways open. It takes some getting used to, but we adapted within a week. This isn’t to say that it’s not a big deal for many people — it can be. But it’s not as scary as many fear. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 26882 - Posted: 12.09.2019

Alejandra Manjarrez Typically, the worm Caenorhabditis elegans falls asleep after it experiences stress or hours of swimming. In a recent study, scientists observed another sleep trigger: being confined to a microfluidic chamber. As such devices are widely used to analyze different worm behaviors, the authors caution that the sleep induction could interfere with data interpretation. The results were published November 6 in Nature Communications. “In our field, microfluidic chambers have become very commonly used, and they are valuable tools for precise environmental control and for neural imaging . . . but what this study highlights is that we are significantly impacting the physiology and behavior of these animals by confining them in such a way,” says Cheryl Van Buskirk, a geneticist at California State University in Northridge. Van Buskirk studies sleep and stress response in worms, but she was not involved in this research. The team first observed this behavior while developing a technique to make electrical measurements of individual cells in worms placed in microfluidic chambers. They noticed that the muscle cells of these animals would not show any activity during some periods of time. Inactivity, however, is not always equivalent to sleep. “There are specific criteria for sleep, so we actually spent a good deal of the [latest] paper testing those specific criteria,” says Daniel Gonzales, who participated in this study as a graduate student at Rice University in Houston, but has now moved to Purdue University in Indiana. They tested, for example, whether this behavior was reversible, if it was associated with a decreased response to stimuli, and if the worms took on a stereotypical sleep posture. They found that, in addition to fulfilling these criteria, this microfluidics-induced quiescence was also regulated by neurons previously reported to control sleep in C. elegans. © 1986–2019 The Scientist.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 26840 - Posted: 11.21.2019

By Kim Tingley We humans spend a third of our lives asleep, oblivious to our surroundings and temporarily paralyzed. It’s a vulnerability that would seem to diminish our odds of survival, so evolutionarily speaking it must also somehow confer tremendous benefits. Yet our best guesses about what those benefits are tend to come from observing what happens when sleep is curtailed. As far as we know, all animals sleep in some way; deprive most of them of it for long enough, and they will die, but exactly why is unclear. In 2015, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society published a joint statement, based on a comprehensive review of research, saying that “sleeping less than seven hours per night on a regular basis” — which is the case for an estimated 35 to 40 percent of Americans during the workweek — is associated with adverse health outcomes. These include weight gain and obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke, depression, impaired immune function, increased pain, greater likelihood of accidents and “increased risk of death.” The National Institutes of Health reported last year that sleep deficits may increase the beta-amyloid proteins in the brain linked with Alzheimer’s disease. But when it comes to “what sleep is, how much you need and what it’s for,” says Louis Ptacek, a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, “we know almost nothing — other than it’s bad not to get enough of it.” Indeed, says David Dinges, one of the statement’s authors and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, “All of this makes it really tough to send out simple messages to the public about when you should sleep and how much you should sleep.” Scientists believe that there are two separate but interrelated internal systems that regulate sleep. The first is the circadian system that tells our body when to sleep. Medicine already knows a great deal about how it works: Approximately every 24 hours, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a small region in the hypothalamus, orchestrates physiological changes to prepare us for sleep, like lowering body temperature and releasing dopamine. But the second system — the one that tells our body the amount of sleep it needs — is still mysterious. One way to elucidate it would be to find genes that govern how long or deeply people sleep and observe where those genes are active. This fall, Ptacek, Ying-Hui Fu and other colleagues announced, in the journals Neuron and Science Translational Medicine, the discovery of two genetic mutations that seem to cause certain people to sleep far less than average. This brought the number of genes known to be involved in sleep duration to just three. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 26833 - Posted: 11.19.2019

By Nicholas Bakalar Poor sleepers may be at increased risk for cardiovascular disease. Chinese researchers used data on 487,200 people ages 30 to 79, generally healthy at the start of the study. The participants reported on the frequency of three symptoms of poor sleep: difficulty falling or staying asleep, daytime sleepiness and early morning awakening. The study is in Neurology. The scientists followed the group for an average of 10 years, during which there were 130,032 cases of cardiovascular disease. After adjusting for age, alcohol consumption, family history of cardiovascular disease and many other factors, they found that difficulty falling asleep was associated with a 9 percent increased relative risk for cardiovascular disease, early morning awakening with a 7 percent increased risk, and daytime sleepiness with a 13 percent increased risk. Compared with those who had no sleep problems, those with all three symptoms had an 18 percent increased relative risk of cardiovascular disease. The link was especially strong in younger people. The lead author, Canqing Yu, an associate professor at Peking University, noted that the sleep data depended on self-reports, and this observational study does not prove cause and effect. “People with difficulty sleeping shouldn’t be alarmed by this finding,” he said. “Poor sleep is a minor contributor to cardiovascular disease. But among young people who have no other risk factors, this can be important.” © 2019 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 26813 - Posted: 11.12.2019

By Austin Frakt Daylight Saving Time ended on Sunday, and for many of us the extra hour of sleep has provided a small energy boost. It’s widely known that sleep affects our mood and health. Less understood is how it can also affect our paychecks. A study published last year in the Review of Economics and Statistics found that workers who live in locations where people get more sleep tend to earn more than those in areas where people get less. One theory: Better-rested workers are more productive and are compensated for it with additional income. “There are other explanations, but we consider them less likely,” said an author of the study, Matthew Gibson, an economist at Williams College. It’s not as if simply sleeping more will cause your boss to pay you more. In fact, if you get that extra sleep by being late for work, you might earn less or even lose your job. So how would the sleep-income relationship actually work? Studying the issue is complicated by reverse causality: Not only does sleep affect work, but work also affects sleep. On an individual level, people who work more, and earn more for it, often sleep less. Studies show that higher-income earners sleep less than lower-income ones. That could be because higher-income people are spending more time working, so they have less time for sleep. Additionally, working more is stressful, and stress disrupts sleep. But poor sleep contributes to stress, too. A study in Sleep Health found that a poorer night’s sleep is followed by more stress and distracting thoughts at work. Other studies also find that less and poorer sleep is associated with more conflict and stress the next day. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 26787 - Posted: 11.04.2019

By Laura Sanders Every 20 seconds, a wave of fresh cerebrospinal fluid rolls into the sleeping brain. These slow, rhythmic blasts, described for the first time in the Nov. 1 Science, may help explain why sleep is so important for brain health. Studies on animals have shown that the fluid, called CSF, can wash harmful proteins, including those implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, out of the brain. The new results give heft to the idea that a similar power wash happens in sleeping people. Researchers studied 13 healthy, young people in an MRI scanner as they fell into non-REM sleep, the type of slumber that takes up most of the night. At the same time, the scientists monitored different sorts of activity in participants’ heads. Electrodes measured the activity of large collections of nerve cells, and functional MRI measured the presence of oxygenated blood that gives energy to those nerve cells. By using a form of rapid fMRI, the team also measured another type of activity — the movements of CSF in the brain. Fast fMRI revealed waves of fresh CSF that flowed rhythmically into the sleeping brains, a pattern that was obvious — and big, says study coauthor Laura Lewis, a neuroscientist and engineer at Boston University. “I’ve never had something jump out at me to this degree,” she says. “It was very striking.” Awake people have small, gentle waves of CSF that are largely linked to breathing patterns. In contrast, the sleep waves were tsunamis. “The waves we saw during sleep were much, much larger, and higher velocity,” Lewis says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 1: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 26781 - Posted: 11.01.2019

By Gretchen Reynolds Taking more steps during the day may be related to better sleep at night, according to an encouraging new study of lifestyle and sleep patterns. The study, which delved into the links between walking and snoozing, suggests that being active can influence how well we sleep, whether we actually exercise or not. Sleep and exercise scientists have long been intrigued and befuddled by the ties between physical activity and somnolence. To most of us, it might seem as if that relationship should be uncomplicated, advantageous and one-way. You work out, grow tired and sleep better that night. But a variety of past studies indicate that the effects of exercise on sleep are more scrambled than that. In some studies, when people work out strenuously, they sleep relatively poorly, suggesting that intense exercise might disrupt slumber. Other experiments have found that the impacts of exertion and sleep work both ways; after a night of ragged sleep, people often report finding their normal workout extra wearing. Past research also has produced conflicting results about whether and how the timing of exercise matters, and if afternoon workouts aid or impair that night’s sleep. Most of these past studies have focused on planned exercise, though, not more incidental, everyday physical activity, and much of the research has involved people with clinical sleep problems, such as insomnia. Little has been known about whether simply moving around more during the day, absent formal exercise, might influence sleep, particularly in people who already tend to sleep fairly well. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 26771 - Posted: 10.30.2019