RxPG News : Sleep Hygiene

Snoring due to sleep apnea can damage brain severely

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:23:33 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Snoring due sleep apnea may impair brain function in a much worse way than previously thought, according to a new study.

Sufferers of Obstructive Sleep Apnea - experience similar changes in brain biochemistry as people who have had a severe stroke or who are dying, the research shows.

OSA is caused by obstruction of the airway, a disorder characterised by pauses in breathing during sleep.

A study by University of New South Wales - Brain Sciences is the first to analyse, in a second-by-second timeframe, what is happening in the brains of sufferers as they sleep.

Previous studies have focussed on recreating oxygen impairment in patients who are awake.

'It used to be thought that apnoeic snoring had absolutely no acute effects on brain function but this is plainly not true,' said study co-author Caroline Rae, professor at Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute.

Sleep apnea affects as many as one in four middle-aged men, with around three percent going on to experience a severe form of the condition characterised by extended pauses in breathing, repetitive asphyxia and sleep fragmentation.

Children with enlarged tonsils and adenoids are also affected, raising concerns of long-term cognitive damage.

Rae and collaborators from Sydney University's Woolcock Institute used magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study the brains of 13 men with severe, untreated, obstructive sleep apnea, said a UNSW release.

They found that even a moderate degree of oxygen desaturation during the patients' sleep had significant effects on the brain's bioenergetic status.

'The findings show that lack of oxygen while asleep may be far more detrimental than when awake, possibly because the normal compensatory mechanisms don't work as well when you are asleep,' said Rae.

These findings were published in the May edition of Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism.

Meditation may be effective for treating insomnia

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:00:57 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Meditation may be an effective remedy in treating insomnia, latest research suggests.

According to Ramadevi Gourineni, principal study investigator and director of the insomnia programme at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Illinois, insomnia is thought to be a 24-hour problem of hyper-arousal. Moreover, elevated measures of arousal are seen throughout the day.

The study collected data from 11 healthy subjects between the ages of 25 and 45 years who suffered from chronic primary insomnia. Participants were divided into two intervention groups for two months.

The first group was taught Kriya Yoga, a form of meditation that is used to focus internalized attention and has been shown to reduce measures of arousal. The second group received health education.

Participants of the health education group also received information about health-related topics and how to improve health through nutrition, exercise, weight loss and stress management.

Results suggested that patients saw improvements in subjective sleep quality and sleep diary parameters while practicing meditation. Patients who practiced meditation saw improvements in sleep latency, total sleep time, total wake time, wake after sleep onset, sleep efficiency and sleep quality.

Findings of this study were presented at SLEEP 2009, the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

Dr. Ramadevi Gourineni completed her medical school at Kurnool Medical College in Andhra Pradesh, India. She was raised in the United States prior to this. Dr. Gourineni's has a special interest in behavioural treatment of insomnia and currently is involved in research studying the effects of meditation on stress and sleep in individuals with chronic insomnia.

Sleep helps store useful information, says study

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 04:14:14 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A good night's sleep after a period of learning help brain preserve the most important memories, a new study has found.

Using data from a group of 44 college students aged 18 to 22, the study findings showed that sleeping helps brain use selective process to store most relevant information as long as four months.

The findings were presented Thursday at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies annual meeting, in Seattle.

The study was conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Think of sleep as a period of memory consolidation, where the sleeping brain calculates what is most important about a memory and selects the best candidates for long-term memory, said study author Jessica Payne, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology.

'It may be that the chemical and physiological aspects of sleep underlying memory consolidation are more effective if a particular memory is 'tagged' shortly prior to sleeping,' she said.

She added that sleep seems to selectively preserve memories that are emotionally important and relevant to future goals.

People awakened after sleeping more than a few minutes are usually unable to recall the last few minutes before they fell asleep, earlier studies showed.

This sleep-related form of amnesia is the reason people often forget telephone calls or conversations they've had in the middle of the night. It also explains why people often do not remember their alarms ringing in the morning if they go right back to sleep after turning them off.

Imagery rehearsal therapy improves sleep

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 15:59:37 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) In a study that insomniacs may find welcoming, imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT) has been shown to subjectively improve their ability to get a good night's sleep.

The study, conducted by Yara Molen of Federal University of S'o Paulo, was focused on 24 chronic insomnia patients, each of whom was divided into one of two groups: experimental or control. The subjects participated in a two-hour meeting over a five-week period on sleep education: hygiene, beliefs and attitudes, and worries. The experimental group received instructions for practicing IRT before sleep, with an audio CD for relaxing and releasing worries, and the control group for reading before sleep, for three weeks.

The results showed that the severity of insomnia in the experimental group diminished, while their beliefs and attitudes about sleep, as well as sleep quality, improved. In the control group, the severity of insomnia also diminished, as well as general worries.

Imagery rehearsal therapy was associated with subjective improvement in insomnia severity, sleep quality, sleep disturbance and functional beliefs and attitudes about sleep, said Molen. Although general worries improved only in the control group, worries about sleep improved in both groups.

Insomnia is a classification of sleep disorders in which a person has trouble falling asleep, staying asleep or waking up too early. These disorders may also be defined by an overall poor quality of sleep. Insomnia is a common sleep disorder. About 30 percent of adults have insomnia. It is more common among elderly people and women. Some medical conditions cause insomnia, or it may be a side effect of a medication.

The amount of sleep a person gets affects his or her physical health, emotional well-being, mental abilities, productivity and performance. Recent studies associate lack of sleep with serious health problems such as an increased risk of depression, obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Experts recommend that adults get between seven and eight hours of sleep each night to maintain good health and optimum performance.

Reduced sleep quality can aggravate psychological conditions

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 15:59:37 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Disturbed sleep is a commonly reported symptom among individuals diagnosed with anxiety disorders. However, the direct cause of disrupted sleep is poorly understood. Proper sleep is critical for cognitive and daily functioning, and reduced quality of sleep has the potential to exacerbate pre-existing psychological conditions.

To effectively evaluate differences in sleep architecture after induced stress, Robert Ross MacLean, of Boston University, utilized an objective measure of anxiety and recorded subsequent sleep-wake behavior in rats. In the rodent model, many previous studies had observed differences in sleep-wake behavior after shock exposure, but the level of anxiety was merely assumed or absent.

MacLean's study exposed naive rats to one of three paradigms: escapable shock, inescapable shock or fear conditioning. Immediately after experimental manipulation, individual level of anxiety was assessed using the elevated-plus maze apparatus, and polygraphic signs of sleep-wake behavior were recorded for six hours.

By measuring individual anxiety level prior to recording sleep, MacLean was able to make comparisons between sleep architecture and level of anxiety. In doing so, MacLean intended to establish a direct link between variation in sleep architecture and heightened anxiety in the rodent model.

These changes could elucidate sleep-wake behavior associated with the subjective complaint of disrupted sleep, thus creating the potential for new diagnostic and assessment criteria for anxiety disorders, said MacLean. This information is relevant given the recent influx of psychological disorders in Iraq war veterans, particularly generalized anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The amount of sleep a person gets affects his or her physical health, emotional well-being, mental abilities, productivity and performance. Recent studies associate lack of sleep with serious health problems such as an increased risk of depression, obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Experts recommend that adults get between seven and eight hours of sleep each night to maintain good health and optimum performance.

Sleep-related breathing disorder can increase risk of depression

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 18:33:37 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) CHICAGOIndividuals who have sleep-related breathing disorder appear significantly more likely to develop depression, with odds of depression increasing as breathing disorders becomes more severe, according to a study in the September 18 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, a theme issue on sleep.

Frequent pauses in breathing, labored breathing or reduced breathing during the night are hallmark signs of sleep-related breathing disorder, according to background information in the article. The disorder has been linked to a variety of negative health consequences, including cardiovascular disease and difficulty functioning during the day. Previous studies have suggested that depression improves when sleep-related breathing disorder is treated, indicating that these two common conditions are related. Characterizing the relationship, the authors write, could guide screening for depressive symptoms in patient populations with sleep-related breathing disorder, suggest strategies for managing sleep-related breathing disorderrelated depression and alert clinicians about the possibility of untreated depression complicating adherence to sleep-related breathing disorder mitigation strategies and treatments ....

Paul E. Peppard, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison evaluated 1,408 adults (788 men, 620 women) who were between the ages of 30 and 60 at the beginning of the study, in 1988. The participants stayed overnight in a laboratory once every four years, during which time sleep was monitored with a test known as polysomnography and breathing disturbances were recorded. By May 2005, 449 participants had completed one sleep study, 382 completed two, 319 completed three and 258 completed four, for a total of 3,202 sleep studies. At each sleep study, body mass index was recorded and interviews and questionnaires completed by participants provided information about medical history, lifestyle habits, demographics and whether they had difficulty sleeping at night (insomnia) or felt sleepy during the day.

During the 3,202 sleep studies, 334 showed no evidence of reduced or paused breathing. Among cases of sleep-related breathing disorder, 1,911 were categorized as minimal, defined as an average of fewer than five incidences of reduced or paused breathing per hour; 606 were mild, with an average of five to 14 such events per hour; and 351 were moderate or worse, with 15 or more events per hour. About twice as many men as women had mild, moderate or worse sleep-related breathing disorder14 percent of sleep studies among men revealed moderate sleep-related breathing disorder, vs. 6 percent of women. Throughout the study, there were 649 cases of mild depression and 392 of moderate or more severe depression. Women were about twice as likely to be depressed as men (27 percent vs. 15 percent).

Compared with patients without sleep-related breathing disorder, those with minimal cases of the condition were 1.6 times as likely to be depressed; those with mild cases, twice as likely; and those with moderate or worse, 2.6 times as likely. Individuals whose breathing problems worsened over time increased their risk for depression. Among these studies, an increase in sleep-related breathing disorder to the next higher category (for instance, from no sleep-related breathing disorder to minimal sleep-related breathing disorder) was associated with a 1.8-fold increased odds for development of depression compared with unchanging sleep-related breathing disorder, the authors write. For example, persons initially without sleep-related breathing disorder but in whom minimal sleep-related breathing disorder developed during a four-year period are estimated to be at 80 percent greater odds for development of depression than those who remain without sleep-related breathing disorder.

Our longitudinal findings of a dose-response association between sleep-related breathing disorder and depression provide evidence consistent with a causal link between these conditions and should heighten clinical suspicion of depression in those with sleep-related breathing disorder, they conclude.

Snoring may impact marital satisfaction

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 15:37:37 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Snoring can have more of an impact on marriages than most couples think, a scientific study has shown.

The Sleep Disorders Center at Rush University Medical Center in Illinois has been conducting the study to evaluate how a husband's sleep apnea or snoring impacts the wife's quality of sleep as well as the couple's marital satisfaction.

"This is a frequent problem within marriages that nobody is paying enough attention to," said Rosalind Cartwright, founder of the Sleep Disorders Center.

"Couples who struggle with sleep apnea have a high divorce rate. Can we save marriages by treating sleep apnea? It's a question we hope to answer," Cartwright was quoted as saying in a statement from the Center.

The "married couples sleep study" is evaluating 10 couples in which the male has been diagnosed with obstructive snoring.

After completing surveys about sleepiness, marriage satisfaction, and quality of life, the couple spends the night in a sleep laboratory where technicians determine each partner's quality and quantity of sleep.

Following two weeks of treatment, the diagnostic tests and surveys are repeated.

"Our early results are showing that the wife's sleep is indeed deprived due to the husband's noisy nights. This is not a mild problem. The lack of sleep for both partners puts a strain on the marriage and creates a hostile and tense situation," said Cartwright.

For patients participating in the study, the Center offers treatment using continuous positive airway pressure. The non-invasive treatment prevents the upper airway from collapsing during sleep, allowing the lungs to function normally during sleep.

"Our early results have been terrific," said Cartwright. "It is beautiful to see couples getting along so much better."

The study of the first 10 couples is likely to be completed by April. Cartwright plans to present the findings this summer. If the results are promising, the study will be expanded to include more couples.

Regular didgeridoo playing improves your sleep

Tue, 27 Dec 2005 05:44:38 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Regular didgeridoo playing reduces snoring and daytime sleepiness, finds a study published online by the BMJ today.

Snoring and obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome are common sleep disorders caused by the collapse of the upper airways. Continuous positive airway pressure therapy is effective, but is not suitable for many patients.

Reports of didgeridoo players experiencing reduced daytime sleepiness and snoring after practising, led experts in Switzerland to test the theory that training of the upper airways by didgeridoo playing can improve these disorders.

They identified 25 patients with moderate obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome and who complained about snoring. Patients were randomly allocated to an intervention group (didgeridoo lessons and daily practice at home for four months) or a control group (remained on a waiting list for lessons).

Compared with the control group, daytime sleepiness and apnoea scores improved significantly in the didgeridoo group. Partners of patients in the didgeridoo group also reported much less sleep disturbance.

Although overall quality of sleep did not differ significantly between groups, a combined analysis of sleep related measures showed a moderate to large effect of didgeridoo playing.

The authors conclude that regular training of the upper airways by didgeridoo playing reduces daytime sleepiness and snoring in people with moderate obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome and also improves the sleep quality of partners.

Larger trials are needed to confirm our preliminary findings, but our results may give hope to the many people with moderate obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome and snoring, as well as to their partners, they say.