A study in the Feb. 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine shows that patients with severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) report a significantly lower frequency of nightmares than patients with mild or no sleep apnea, indicating that OSA suppresses the cognitive experience of nightmare recall.
Sleepiness at the wheel and poor sleep quality significantly increase the risk of motor vehicle accidents in adolescents.
Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia significantly improved sleep for patients with chronic neck or back pain and also reduced the extent to which pain interfered with their daily functioning, according to a new study.
It is thought that the sleep disorder narcolepsy is an autoimmune disorder — that is, it is caused by the individual’s immune system attacking certain cells in the body — but this had not been proven definitively. But now, researchers have now identified autoantibodies (immune molecules that target a natural protein in the body rather than a protein from an infectious agent) in narcolepsy patients.
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) continues to be the third leading cause of infant death, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), despite a decline in SIDS that is associated with a rise in safe-sleep practices for newborns and infants. Researchers have identified that more than 96 percent of infants who died of SIDS were exposed to known risk factors, among them sleeping on their side or stomach, or exposure to tobacco smoke, and that 78 percent of SIDS cases contained multiple risk factors.
If you see a student dozing in the library or a co-worker catching 40 winks in her cubicle, don’t roll your eyes. New research shows that an hour’s nap can dramatically boost and restore your brain power. Indeed, the findings suggest that a biphasic sleep schedule not only refreshes the mind, but can make you smarter.
Psychologists have found that infants need adequate sleep, including regular naps, in order to effectively learn about the new world they live in.
Children with insomnia and shorter sleep duration had impaired modulation of heart rhythm during sleep, researchers report.
If you aren’t getting a good, consistent and regular night’s sleep, a new study suggests it could reduce your ability to handle oxidative stress, cause impacts to your health, increase motor and neurological deterioration, speed aging and ultimately cut short your life. That is, if your “biological clock” genes work the same way as those of a fruit fly. And they probably do.
Not getting enough sleep does more damage than just leaving you with puffy eyes. It can cause fat to accumulate around your organs — more dangerous, researchers say, than those pesky love handles and jiggly thighs.
Significant differences have been found in the sleep habits and attitudes of Asians, African-Americans, Hispanics and whites.
A study shows that frequent napping is associated with an elevated prevalence of type 2 diabetes and impaired fasting glucose in an older Chinese population.
N-acetylserotonin, the immediate precursor to melatonin, activates the same growth circuits in the brain as BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). The results have implications for how some antidepressants function and suggest that the molecules and pathways involved in mood regulation and circadian rhythms are intertwined.
A new national study suggests that preschool-aged children are likely to have a lower risk for obesity if they regularly engage in one or more of three specific household routines: eating dinner as a family, getting adequate sleep and limiting their weekday television viewing time. The study showed that 4-year-olds living in homes with all three routines had an almost 40 percent lower prevalence of obesity than did children living in homes that practiced none of these routines.
Sleeping is known to help humans stabilize information and tasks learned during the preceding day. Now, researchers have found that sleep has similar effects upon learning in starlings, a discovery that will open up future research into how the brain learns and preserves information. The research fills an important gap between human behavioral findings and animal experiments of how the brain changes after learning and sleep.
Obstructive sleep apnea adversely affects glucose control in patients with type 2 diabetes, according to a new study.
A robust new technique for screening drugs’ effects on zebrafish behavior is pointing scientists toward unexpected compounds and pathways that may govern sleep and wakefulness in humans. Among their more intriguing findings: Various anti-inflammatory agents in the immune system, long known to induce sleep during infection, may also shape normal sleep/wake cycles.
Cognitive fluctuations, or episodes when train of thought temporarily is lost, are more likely to occur in older persons who are developing Alzheimer’s disease than in their healthy peers, according to scientists. Cognitive fluctuations include excessive daytime sleepiness, staring into space and disorganized or illogical thinking.
Chronic and severely stressful situations, like those connected to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, have been associated with smaller volumes in “stress sensitive” brain regions, such as the cingulate region of the cerebral cortex and the hippocampus, a brain region involved in memory formation.
The brains of people under anesthesia respond to stimuli as they do in the deepest part of sleep — lending credence to a developing theory of consciousness and suggesting a new method to assess loss of consciousness in conditions such as coma.
A new study suggests that healthy older adults without sleep disorders can expect to have a reduced “sleep need” and to be less sleepy during the day than healthy young adults.
In a study of 36 newly diagnosed men with severe obstructive sleep apnea and 31 healthy controls, significant gray matter concentration deficits were found in multiple brain areas of men with OSA, including limbic structures, prefrontal cortices and the cerebellum. These changes in brain structure may be related to problems such as memory impairment and executive dysfunction that are observed in OSA patients.
The brains of infants who die of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) produce low levels of serotonin, a brain chemical that conveys messages between cells and plays a vital role in regulating breathing, heart rate, and sleep, researchers report.
A new study shows that erectile dysfunction was more common in older men with restless leg syndrome (RLS) than in those without RLS, and the magnitude of this association increased with a higher frequency of RLS symptoms.
New research finds that adolescents with bedtimes that were set earlier by parents were significantly less likely to suffer from depression and to think about committing suicide, suggesting that earlier bedtimes could have a protective effect by lengthening sleep duration and increasing the likelihood of getting enough sleep.
