Researchers develop computational method for aligning internal body clock with local, environmental time.
Traveling across several times zones can cause an individual to experience jet lag, which includes trouble sleeping at night and trouble remaining awake during the day.
Results of a study published in the June 15, 2009 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine show that complaints of fatigue and tiredness in patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) improved significantly with good adherence to continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy, suggesting that — like the symptom of excessive daytime sleepiness — these complaints are important symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea.
The results demonstrate good adherence to CPAP therapy for an average of five or more hours per night resolved baseline complaints of fatigue in 45 of 80 participants (56 percent), tiredness in 56 of 96 participants (58 percent) and sleepiness in 48 of 72 participants (67 percent); improvement of each symptom was significantly better among CPAP-adherent participants than among inadequately treated subjects. A baseline complaint of lack of energy also was resolved in 47 of 100 participants with good CPAP adherence, but this improvement failed to reach statistical significance when compared with inadequately treated participants.
A research abstract presented at Sleep 2009 demonstrates that sleep selectively preserves memories that are emotionally salient and relevant to future goals when sleep follows soon after learning. Effects persist for as long as four months after the memory is created.
Results show the sleeping brain seems to calculate what’s most important about an experience and then selects only what is adaptive for consolidation and long-term storage. Across delays of 24 hours, or even three-to-four months, sleeping soon after learning preserved the trade-off as compared to waiting an entire day before going to sleep.
Common hassles at work are more likely than long hours, night shifts or job insecurity to follow workers home and interfere with their sleep.
That’s the conclusion of a University of Michigan study which was initially presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America.
If there’s one thing that everyone knows about newborn babies, it’s that they don’t sleep through the night, and neither do their parents. But in fact, those first six months of life are crucial to developing the regular sleeping and waking patterns, known as circadian rhythms, that a child will need for a healthy future.
Some children may start life with the sleep odds stacked against them, though, say University of Michigan sleep experts who study the issue. They will present data from their study next week at the European Sleep Research Society meeting in Glasgow, Scotland.
Research engineers and sleep medicine specialists from two Michigan universities have joined technical and clinical hands to put innovative quantitative analysis, signal-processing technology and computer algorithms to work in the sleep lab. One of their recent findings is that a new approach to analyzing sleep fragmentation appears to distinguish fibromyalgia patients from healthy controls.
Joseph W. Burns, a research scientist and engineer at the Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI); Ronald D. Chervin, director of the University of Michigan’s Michael S. Aldrich Sleep Disorders Laboratory; and Leslie Crofford, director of the Center for the Advancement of Women’s Health at the University of Kentucky, report the results of their study in the August 2008 issue of the journal Sleep Medicine.
Neuroscience researchers at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, located in Singapore, have shown for the first time what happens to the visual perceptions of healthy but sleep-deprived volunteers who fight to stay awake, like people who try to drive through the night.
This study has implications for a whole range of people who have to struggle through night work, from truckers to on-call doctors.
Previously uninsured adults who received Medicare coverage reported improvements in health, especially those with cardiovascular disease or diabetes, according to a study published in the December 26 issue of JAMA.
“Uninsured near-elderly adults, particularly those with cardiovascular disease or diabetes, experience worse health outcomes and use more health services as Medicare beneficiaries after age 65 years than insured near-elderly adults. Because chronic diseases are prevalent and insurance coverage is often unaffordable for older uninsured adults, the impact of near-universal Medicare coverage at age 65 years on the health of previously uninsured adults may be substantial,” the authors write.
Patients who snore or have other symptoms of sleep apnea often undergo testing in a sleep laboratory to measure the number of breathing pauses and arousals that occur while they slumber. But doctors find these tests do not effectively predict daytime consequences suspected to arise from sleep apnea, such as sleepiness in adults or hyperactivity in children.
Now, neurologists at the University of Michigan Health System and engineers at Altarum Institute in Ann Arbor, Mich., have discovered evidence that the disruption of sleep in sleep apnea may be much more frequent than the breathing pauses, or apneas, themselves.
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As of May 2, 2009 at 9:47 p.m. (-0500) (ET), the U.S. population
was 306,340,710. Sleep researchers estimate approximately seven percent
of the population suffers from obstructive sleep apnea. Using that
estimate, there are potentially 21,443,850 apneics in the U.S.
~~ Apnea around the world ~~
As of May 2, 2009 at 9:47 p.m. (-0500) (ET), the world population
was 6,777,286,604. Sleep researchers estimate approximately seven percent
of the population suffers from obstructive sleep apnea. Using that
estimate, there are potentially 474,410,062 apneics in the world.
