Sleep Studies: Tests & Results According to the National Institutes of Health, 50 to 70 million Americans are affected by chronic sleep disorders and intermittent sleep problems that can significantly diminish health, alertness and safety. Untreated sleep disorders have been linked to hypertension, heart disease, stroke, depression, diabetes and other chronic diseases. Sleep problems can take many forms and can involve too little sleep, too much sleep or inadequate quality of sleep. The Institute of Medicine recently estimated in its report, Sleep Disorders and Sleep Deprivation: An Unmet Public Health Problem , that “hundreds of billions of dollars a year are spent on direct medical costs related to sleep disorders such as doctor visits, hospital services, prescriptions, and over-the-counter medications.” Sleep problems and lack of sleep can affect everything from personal and work productivity to behavioral and relationship problems. Sleep problems can have serious consequences. Should Your Sleep Be Evaluated?
The problem with taking too many vitamins 17 October 2013Last updated at 05:39 ET Millions of people swear by vitamin supplements. But many are wasting their time and some could even be harming themselves, argues Dr Chris van Tulleken. In November 1912 a party of three men and 16 dogs set out from a remote base in eastern Antarctica to explore a series of crevasses many hundreds of miles away. Three months later just one of the men returned. His name was Douglas Mawson. A month into their journey, one of the team, along with the tent, most of the provisions and six dogs plunged into a crevasse, never to be seen again. Mawson suffered similar symptoms. It was the suffering of early explorers and sailors that motivated the first studies of vitamins and their deficiency diseases. At first sight Mawson's story seems to be another such tale - starvation combined with a lack of some vital nutrient. Mawson lived to the decent age of 76 but in his story we find the cautionary tale for our times - vitamins can be very bad for you.
Scientific Discovery - Better Sleep With Acupuncture [1132] | Acupuncture Continuing Education News | Acupuncture News Electrical engineers in a medical research team discovered how acupuncture benefits sleep. They did it by measuring brain activity with EEG (electroencephalography) before, during and after an acupuncture treatment. Results were conclusive, acupuncture significantly increases slow wave activity of the brain relative to fast wave activity in both the frontal and central lobes. EEGThe acupuncture point used in this study increases the delta band power density, a known sleep related brain wave band. The researchers applied manual acupuncture to humans at acupoint ST36. The researchers note that “acupuncture at ST36 can induce obvious changes in different EEG rhythms in healthy subjects.” ST36 Acupuncture EEG Reference:Chin.
Vimeo Lack of sleep linked to Alzheimer's disease Published 21 October 2013 09:14 PM The findings follow earlier research indicating that one of the functions of sleep is to purge the brain of toxic proteins. One such harmful protein is beta-amyloid (Abeta), which accumulates in the brains of people with Alzheimer's. The new study appears to reinforce the importance of sleep in staving off dementia. US scientists who looked at data on 70 adults with an average age of 76 found that those who slept less, and who experienced low quality sleep, had higher levels of beta-amyloid. Self-reported sleep duration in the participants ranged from five to seven hours a night. The authors, led by Dr Adam Spira, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, wrote in the journal JAMA Neurology: "In summary, our findings in a sample of community-dwelling older adults indicate that reports of shorter sleep duration and poorer sleep quality are associated with a greater Î'beta burden.
Who'd Have Thought A Man Talking About His Arm Would Be So Interesting? Is the whole of science, culture, and law compressed into a tiny mole on his forearm? In case you missed any of that, here are the lyrics according to the artist: I want you to imagine my arm is a timelineAnd here is the start of defined timein the middle is all of civilized lifewhen sentience entered into the pipelineabout 50,000 years of cities, towns and theories up until we're the ones in the limelightthat's fine, right?okso then after this hindsight we have the millions and millions of years of futurewhere billions of civilians will be soon, yeah? according to moore's law they'll exponentially develop eventually exceeding the power of a human brainaround eleven more years at the concluded rate, but anywayif you could wait a little longer, it'd be true to say that computers gain the cumulative brain power of the human race - so soon you could make a simulation of nature; a virtual universe that for all intents and purposes is basically a version of the world, like the matrix.
Sleeping beauty | HertfordshireMercury | Beauty Banish eye bags and tired skin with a restful night. Lisa Haynes reveals how to reap the benefits of beauty sleep With the clocks going back to signal winter’s imminent arrival, we’re entering a new phase of sleep. Darker mornings are creeping in, making groggy wake-up calls the norm until spring. “Sleep is affected by melatonin levels, which in turn is affected by light and darkness, so the seasonal change causes all sorts of disruption to the body,” explains Dick Middleton, technical director for Schwabe herbal remedies. But if you can get your optimum amount of sleep, you’ll set yourself up for a recharged and revived new dawn. With the restorative beauty sleep fairies getting to work overnight, there’s more to pillow time than meets the eye. If you’re a sleep under-achiever, stress and anxiety are often to blame when it comes to disturbed nights. “Sleep is not a passive process - you need to respect it and learn how to do it as a skill,” says sleep expert Kathleen McGrath.
Josh Kezer Lack of sleep could lead to heart disease and type 2 diabetes Failing to get enough sleep doesn’t only make you feel sluggish and unfocused — it can be bad for your health. Scientists have told us that getting insufficient sleep can increase our risk of diseases like type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. But a recent study takes prior research linking sleep deprivation and increased disease risk further, asking how lack of sleep impacts our health. The study from researchers with the University of Helsinki, was published in PLOS One and looked at what kind of biological mechanisms were linked to sleep deprivation and how these changes can affect the immune system. This research is important as its estimated as many as one-third of US adults don’t get the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep per night. In the sleep lab of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, researchers deprived study participants of sleep limiting them to only four hours per night for five consecutive days, mimicking what might happen during a typical workweek.