The relationship between sleep and of weight

Studies ostentation that skimping on sleep may lead to superiority gain. But can getting shut-eye help you dissipate weight? We all know that diet and disturb are the cornerstones of a weight-loss program. But can siesta also help you maintain a health avoirdupois or even drop a few pounds?
"There are more and more studies showing that not getting ample supply sleep or not getting good quality of saw wood can to weight gain," says Raj Kakar, MD, MPH, the medical manager at the Dallas Center for Sleep Disorders in Plano, Texas.
Sleep and Body Weight: What the Research Says
  Precisely as obesity has become a worldwide rampant over the past few decades, more people have on the agenda c trick also become chronically be in the land of Nod-deprived. According to National Slumber Foundation surveys, 35 percent of Americans were sleeping for eight hours a shades of night in 1998, compared with justified 26 percent in 2005. Researchers be convinced of that the growing obesity and catnap deprivation epidemics may be related.
A up to date study followed a group of 40- to 60-year-old women for five to seven years and tracked their bulk and sleep disorder patterns. The researchers build that women who reported having unrest falling asleep, waking up again at night, or having trouble staying asleep were significantly more likely to entertain "major weight gain" (get further of 11 pounds or more).
Another about examined the eating and exercise habits of a sort of young healthy men after sleeping for eight hours and four hours on two consecutive nights. The researchers establish that the men ate significantly more (an customary of 560 excess calories in their regular diet) during the day after they were siesta-deprived, compared to what they ate after having a integrity night's sleep.
Researchers feel that insomnia children may be at strikingly high risk of having albatross problems. Studies have firmly found that getting less nod off than recommended is associated with girlhood obesity. In fact, based on drop studies in children, researchers sire calculated that a child's imperil of being overweight or obese is reduced by close by 9 percent for each additional hour of nap per night. 
The Link Between Sleep and Diet
 Kakar says that it is reason that sleep is associated with masses weight for two reasons. Anything else, people who are sleep-badly off may have less zing throughout the day and therefore less motivation to utilize regularly. In fact, people who don't drop enough report getting less gymnastics than people who get passably sleep apnea every gloaming. Second, the amount of drop you get seems to affect the proclivity-controlling hormones ghrelin and leptin, which can flit you reaching for high-carbohydrate, calorie-obtuse foods when you haven't gotten adequately sleep.
Studies display that sleep deprivation can fool to elevations in ghrelin, which is predilection-stimulating, and reductions in leptin, which is disposition-suppressing. "Those hormones are thrown out of whack, so as ghrelin gets ramped up and leptin gets pushed down, you are more proper to go for high-carbohydrate foods and cheerful-energy foods, which occasion you a boost of energy, but can then chain to weight gain," says Kakar. 
Can Sleep Help You Lose Weight? 
 While mounting confirmation indicates that your sleeping habits are affiliated to your body weight, researchers calm don't know for sure whether getting more catch could actually help you lose avoirdupois.
Currently, researchers at the National Institutes of Well-being are conducting a study to determine whether sleeping for a fine fettle amount of time each night (in 7.5 hours) can help sleep-badly off people lose excess weight.
Until more inquire into is conducted on the sleep-weight loss confederation, it makes sense to put "get enough sleep" on your checklist of habits to back up a healthy weight, buy Ambien and keep from gaining unwanted pounds.

Narcolepsy No Laughing Matter for Woman with Cataplexy

Imagine if laughing or being surprised when someone walked into a room caused you to collapse and fall into a deep sleep for up to several minutes. Dr. Claire Allen does not have to imagine it, because she has cataplexy, a rare symptom of narcolepsy, which was causing her to fall asleep up to 100 times a day.

Narcolepsy is an invisible condition until you collapse

The UK Telegraph reports that Dr. Allen, a 35-year-old research scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, was diagnosed with narcolepsy more than five years ago. Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder that involves irregular patterns in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and significant disruptions of a person’s normal sleep/wake cycle.
According to the Narcolepsy Network, the condition affects about 1 in 2,000 people in the United States, and many people with the condition go undiagnosed. Stanford’s Center for Narcolepsy notes that the condition impacts from 0.2 to 1.6 per 1,000 people around the world. In Britain, it is believed to affect an estimated 25,000 individuals.
Narcolepsy often takes years to recognize. The main symptom is excessive daytime sleepiness, with feelings of overwhelming fatigue throughout the day. Often individuals fall asleep for a few seconds at various times during the day. For people with a rare symptom of narcolepsy called cataplexy, emotions trigger them to fall asleep with little warning.
People with cataplexy can collapse or have their heads drop or jaws go slack when they experience a strong emotion, such as joy, laughter, or anger. In the most severe cases, which is what Claire experiences, individuals fall to the ground in a state of paralysis although they are awake and aware of what is happening around them. These episodes are triggered by the brain interpreting the emotional stimulus as the beginnings of REM sleep.
A quick loss of speech and vision are Claire’s only warning of a narcoleptic attack before she collapses, even though she remains awake. In the UK Telegraph she reported that “The attacks are caused by any emotional surprise or shock but laughter is definitely the strongest trigger.”
At one point during her more than five years with the disorder, Clair was collapsing around 100 times a day, with each episode lasting between 30 seconds to five minutes. She had to stop driving, and each day was a series of narcoleptic events. Now she is taking a new drug called Xyrem for her narcolepsy, and the number of collapses has been reduced to just several per month.
Before she began taking Xyrem, Claire was waking up 20 to 30 times a night, and she could not sleep for more than one hour at a time. Because sleep is necessary for the body to repair itself, she not only was losing valuable sleep, but rejuvenation of her skin, nails, and hair. Since starting the medication, Claire’s hair and nails have improved.
Claire notes that “Many people go undiagnosed for many years. Having only half of my symptoms could have a devastating effect on someone’s life.” According to Dr. John Shneerson, an expert at Papworth Hospital’s Sleep Centre in Cambridge, “A great many lives would be improved if narcolepsy were better recognized.”

Sleep Problems Plague Men and Women Soldiers

Soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan experience significant sleep problems, with new data showing they are 28 percent more likely to have insomnia than nondeployed soldiers. A sub-analysis found that women with children and pregnant women suffer more sleep problems than their peers in civilian life.

Deployment has a significant impact on soldiers’ sleep

Investigators gathered data from 41,225 military service personnel regarding the quality and quantity of their sleep. The information was collected via two surveys: one conducted between 2001 and 2003, and a follow-up survey given between 2004 and 2006. The final results were based on the 27 percent (11,035) of soldiers who completed the second survey during or after deployment.
Among the researchers’ findings was that soldiers were 28 percent more likely to have symptoms of insomnia--difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep—than their fellow soldiers who had not been deployed. The soldiers who completed the follow-up survey after deployment also were 21 percent more likely to experience sleep problems.
Another significant finding was that sleep problems were more common among soldiers who also had mental health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression, or if they said they were in fair or poor health. Earlier studies have shown that PTSD and depression are serious problems for soldiers who return home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
A 2006 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, for example, noted that one-third of US military personnel from the Iraq war accessed mental health services when they returned home. A 2010 study in the Archives of General Psychiatry reported that an average of 10 percent of returning soldiers suffer from PTSD or depression, with many displaying violent behavior as well.
Ringing in the ears, or tinnitus, is a major cause of long-term sleep problems. Tinnitus is the most common injury suffered by soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report in the November 2009 issue of the Journal of Clinical Nursing.
Among the other significant findings in the new study was that female soldiers--mothers of young children and pregnant women—were averaging less than six hours of sleep per night. According to lead author Amber D. Seelig, data analyst for the Department of Deployment Health Research at the Naval Health Research Center, “We were surprised to see how little sleep pregnant and postpartum women were getting.”
Researchers pointed out that “women in our study were reporting much shorter sleep than civilian pregnant women.” They speculated that the stress of pregnancy and motherhood was exacerbated among female soldiers who face the possibility of future deployment and being away from their children.
The new study, which appears in the December 1 issue of Sleep, suggests that one way to address the sleep problems that plague men and women soldiers is to promote healthier sleep patterns for military personnel. Whether such measures could have a positive impact on sleep among soldiers who suffer the traumas of war is unknown.

Physicians seek to improve the quality of sleep in ICU

Restorative Sleep
The sleep patterns of patients in the intensive care unit are so superficial that they barely spend any time in the restorative stages of sleep that aid in healing, UT Southwestern Medical Center physicians have found.
“Current clinical-care protocols routinely and severely deprive critically ill patients of sleep at a time when the need for adequate rest is perhaps most essential,” said Dr. Randall Friese, assistant professor of burn/trauma/critical care at UT Southwestern and lead author of a study appearing in today’s issue of The Journal of Trauma: Injury, Infection and Critical Care.
“We haven’t recognized the importance of prescribing sleep,” said Dr. Friese, whose study is one of the first to examine the sleep patterns of surgical and trauma patients. “Patients in the ICU may look like they are sleeping, but they’re not sleeping well. They are not getting the restorative stages that are required.”
Sleep typically occurs at night in successive cyclical stages. Sleep begins in very superficial stages. These stages are followed by deeper, more restorative states, including rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Although researchers continue to investigate exactly what happens in the brain during REM sleep, they do know that it is critical for restorative sleep.
Dr. Friese monitored the sleep patterns of 16 patients in the ICU at Parkland Memorial Hospital who had suffered traumatic injuries or had undergone intra-abdominal surgical procedures. The patients had been in the ICU two to 10 days. Patients suffering brain injuries were excluded from the study because such injuries typically illicit abnormal sleep patterns.
After monitoring the patients’ brain waves in a specially equipped bed for up to 24 hours, Dr. Friese found that patients in the ICU received an acceptable amount of sleep time, but that the sleep patterns were fragmented and significantly abnormal. Patients in the ICU spent 96 percent of their sleep cycle in superficial stages, compared to normal sleep, in which up to 50 percent is spent in the restorative stages.
The next step, Dr. Friese said, is to design a clinical trial that makes the ICU environment more conducive to sleep and then monitor the patients’ outcomes. Some proposed steps to decrease disturbances in the ICU include adjusting monitoring machines so that alarms don’t wake up sleeping patients, providing patients ear plugs and eye shields, dimming the lights, and using pharmacological sleeping aids.
“There are two major things contributing to abnormal sleep in these patients – the pathophysiology of the disease process itself and the stressful environment of the ICU,” Dr. Friese said. “If we can neutralize the stressful environment, maybe we can shorten the hospital stay, lower infection risks and increase patient wound healing.”
Dr. Ramon Diaz-Arrastia, professor of neurology and one of the study’s authors, said the investigation demonstrated “that surgical patients in the ICU have essentially no restorative sleep.
“Restorative sleep is most abundant during the later part of sleep – it is sometime between 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. that the bulk of this stage of sleep occurs. It is likely that with some straightforward measures, such as changing the schedule of nursing intervention, we may help these patients attain the restorative sleep that could improve their outcomes.”

More Than 12 Million People In US Have Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Mayo Clinic physicians offered updates about diagnosing and treating patients with a variety of sleep disorders, including obstructive sleep apnea and sleep behavior disorders. The following are brief summaries of select presentations.
More than 12 million people in the United States have obstructive sleep apnea, a potentially serious disorder in which breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep when the throat muscles relax
People with the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep disorder known as REM behavior disorder (RBD) sometimes act out their dreams by yelling or moving violently during REM sleep. A rare condition, RBD affects between 0.4 percent and 0.5 percent of the population.
Each year, physicians at Mayo Clinic's campuses in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota treat thousands of patients who have sleep disorders.
Obstructive Sleep Apnea Linked with Cardiovascular Problems
Daytime fatigue, sleepiness and sleep-deprived bed partners are several symptoms commonly observed in patients with obstructive sleep apnea. More serious, however, are the cardiovascular problems associated with this sleep disorder.
Mayo Clinic pulmonologist Kannan Ramar, M.B.B.S., M.D., describes how physiological changes that occur during obstructive sleep apnea episodes affect the cardiovascular system. Sudden drops in blood-oxygen levels increase blood pressure and strain the cardiovascular system. About half of those with sleep apnea develop high blood pressure (hypertension), which raises their risk of heart failure and stroke. Obstructive sleep apnea may be associated with strokes, coronary artery disease and metabolic problems such as diabetes. Repeated multiple episodes of low blood oxygen (hypoxia or hypoxemia) can also lead to sudden death from a cardiac problem in people with underlying heart disease. Also, there is a strong association between obstructive sleep apnea and dangerous heart rhythm changes (dysrhythmias).
"Mounting data suggests that obstructive sleep apnea contributes to cardiovascular disease, independent of obesity and other cardiovascular risk factors," explains Dr. Ramar. "Considering that obstructive sleep apnea is treatable, establishing causality with other cardiovascular disorders has far-reaching implications. Long-term studies are needed to assess the impact that treatment with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP)and other treatment modalities has upon cardiovascular outcomes."
CPAP therapy is a preferred method of treating sleep apnea. A machine delivers air pressure through a mask placed over the nose during sleep. CPAP elevates the air pressure in the upper airway passages slightly to keep these passages open, and to prevent apnea and snoring.

U-M To Explore Sleep, Biological Rhythms, Mental Health Links

One of the world’s first laboratories devoted solely to research on how sleep and biological rhythms influence depression, substance abuse and other aspects of mental well-being has opened at the University of Michigan Health System.
The U-M Sleep %26amp; Chronophysiology Laboratory, based at the U-M Depression Center, welcomed the first research volunteers to its new eight-bed facility this month, and is seeking many more participants for a number of research studies.
And even though the comfortable beds, fluffy down comforters and muted lighting make it look more like a cozy hotel than a research lab, the new facility is home to a number of highly scientific studies on sleep and the daily cycles known as circadian rhythms.
Two of the bedrooms, in fact, are located within suites that may be unique in the world. Called Temporal Isolation Labs, they’re designed so that a research volunteer can be closed off entirely from the outside world, unable to tell what time of day it really is.
These suites are specially equipped with banks of lights on the walls and ceiling that can be adjusted precisely by the center’s staff to simulate all times of day or night. This can allow a volunteer’s innate circadian rhythms — patterns of rest and activity in both body and mind — to be monitored or even altered temporarily. The facility can also be used for light therapy to combat problems such as depression.
Now that the laboratory has opened, on the second floor of the Rachel Upjohn Building on U-M’s East Medical Campus, director Roseanne Armitage, Ph.D., foresees that her team and colleagues will be able to discover a wealth of new knowledge about how the mind, body and brain interact to produce sleep irregularities and off-kilter circadian rhythms.
"Already, we know that people with depression, seasonal affective disorders, anxiety disorders, alcoholism, and many more conditions suffer terrible disruptions to their sleep patterns, and that in turn, a lack of good-quality sleep worsens their conditions," says Armitage, a professor of psychiatry at the U-M Medical School. "But there are so many unanswered questions about why this happens, how early in life it begins, and how it might be treated or prevented. This lab will help us do just that."
In all, about 80 percent of adults and teens with depression report that they have severe sleep disturbances, and those with prolonged sleep problems also tend to have worse depression over time, and a higher risk of committing suicide.
Conversely, having even a two-week period of insomnia is associated with a higher risk of developing depression later in life. Sleep problems also interfere with recovery from alcohol dependence and postpartum depression, and in children can be a risk factor for later depression.
Armitage, and the center’s associate director Robert Hoffmann, Ph.D., have been studying sleep, circadian rhythms and mood disorders for decades, including the past five years at U-M. But the new facility doubles the space for their laboratory team, and other U-M researchers, to perform such studies in infants, children, teens and adults.
The new sleep lab complements U-M’s Sleep Disorders Center, which operates outpatient sleep-disorders treatment clinics and two facilities where patients can have overnight sleep tests to diagnose sleep-breathing problems such as sleep apnea, to detect other sleep disorders, or to take part in clinical trials. Psychologist Todd Arnedt, Ph.D., a member of the faculty at both the Sleep Disorders Center and the new sleep research lab, and Director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program, specializes in treating sleep disorders through cognitive behavioral techniques.
The new lab will be staffed seven days a week, with volunteers arriving in the early evening through a special secure entrance and staying until morning, when they can shower and have breakfast before heading to work, home or school. Some might come for several nights in a row, while Temporal Isolation volunteers might stay for several days or even weeks.
Each volunteer has his or her brain waves monitored and recorded overnight, using a technique called electroencephalography or EEG, which can monitor brain activity through small electrodes pasted temporarily to the face and scalp, and linked to a sandwich-sized portable digital recorder. Some volunteers may also wear wristwatch-like devices called actigraphs during the day, to measure their movements and light exposure.
The researchers can then look at all the collected data to see if, for example, a person’s circadian rhythms are out of sync with normal clock time and the daily cycle of day and night — or if their patterns during different sleep stages are abnormal.
Research by the U-M group and others has already revealed that adolescents with depression exhibit highly irregular brain-wave patterns during sleep, and so do teens who are at risk of depression because they have a family history of it. Even babies born to mothers who have depression appear to have altered sleep and circadian rhythms, the team has found.

Narcolepsy and Cataplexy Sleep Disorder Linked To Eating Disorder

The majority of patients with narcolepsy / cataplexy sleep disorder experience a number of symptoms of eating disorders, with an irresistible craving for food and binge eating as the most prominent features, according to a new study.
The study, authored by Hal Droogleever Fortuyn, MD, and Sebastiaan Overeem, MD, of the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in The Netherlands, focused on 60 patients with narcolepsy/cataplexy who were recruited from specialized sleep centers and 120 healthy controls.
According to the results, 23.3 percent of the narcolepsy/cataplexy patients fulfilled the criteria for a clinical eating disorder, as opposed to none of the control subjects. Half of the patients reported a persistent craving for food, as well as binge eating. Twenty-five percent of patients even reported binging at least twice a week.
"These data make it clear that narcolepsy is not just a sleeping disorder, but a hypothalamic disease with a much broader symptom profile," said Dr. Fortuyn. "Hypocretin, the neurotransmitter that is lost in narcolepsy, has been implicated in the regulation of feeding through animal studies. Earlier studies in narcolepsy found a clear increase in body weight. However, we did not find a correlation between binge eating and increased weight. Binge eating is apparently not the direct cause of the obesity in narcolepsy, and this suggests that metabolic alterations may be involved. Nevertheless, our study shows that the loss of hypocretin function makes narcolepsy patients not only struggle with staying awake, but also destabilizes their eating pattern, which makes it harder to stay away from the candy jar."
Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder that causes people to fall asleep uncontrollably during the day. It also includes features of dreaming that occur while awake. Other common symptoms include sleep paralysis, hallucinations and cataplexy. About one out of every 2,000 people is known to have narcolepsy. It affects the same number of men and women.