Sleep Archive

There's new hope for people with hard-to-control blood pressure known as resistant hypertension. Often—70% of the time—they also have obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a condition that interrupts their breathing while they sleep. Now researchers say using a special machine to treat the OSA can help lower blood pressure as well. The findings, published Dec. 11, 2013, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggest that using a small bedside air pump and mask that keep the airways open with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) can lower average daily blood pressure by a few points. Though small, the improvements are important. Nighttime interruptions in breathing stress the cardiovascular system, increasing the risk of heart attack and stroke. A CPAP machine shouldn't replace medications to control blood pressure, but this study suggests the machine may complement them.

When people don't get enough sleep, their attention and concentration abilities decline. Their reaction time lengthens, they're inattentive, and they don't respond as well to environmental signals.

Many conditions, including sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome, pain, and stress, can disrupt your rest. Managing these factors and practicing good sleep habits can help you get a better night's rest.

Sleep apnea—pauses in breathing while sleeping followed by snoring-like gasps for breath—can cause daytime drowsiness and mental fatigue. It can also boost blood pressure and the risk for developing heart disease. A new study suggests that treating sleep apnea by using a breathing machine during sleep can make a difference for people with hard-to-treat high blood pressure. Although blood pressure medications offer a bigger bang for the buck to reduce blood pressure, treating sleep apnea can help, and offers other benefits as well. Getting used to using a breathing machine, which delivers continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), may take some work. One key is to find a mask that works, which may be a trial-and-error process.

Behavior and medication changes can help you kick dependence and get a better night's rest.

Do you take a drug to help you sleep every night? You're not alone. Millions of Americans rely on prescription sleep medications, called sedative hypnotics. "People believe they can't sleep without them, and they stay on them for years," says sleep expert Dr. Lawrence Epstein, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. But you can wean yourself off the drugs using a combination of dose reduction and behavior changes.

Daylight Saving Time officially ends at 2:00 am this Sunday. In theory, “falling back” means an extra hour of sleep this weekend. But it doesn’t usually work out that way. Many people don’t, or can’t, take advantage of this weekend’s extra hour of sleep. And the focus on gaining or losing an hour of sleep overlooks the bigger picture—the effect of Daylight Saving Time transitions on the sleep cycle. This seemingly small one-hour shift in the sleep cycle can affect sleep for up to a week. It’s difficult to side-step the effects of Daylight Saving time on sleep. So be aware that it can take your sleep rhythms a week or so to get adjusted to the new clock.

Planning any skiing or hiking at high altitudes? You might want to rethink where you sleep the night before the activity. A study in the July 2013 American Heart Journal suggests that older men can lower their risk of sudden fatal heart attack by first becoming acclimated to the higher elevation. Researchers analyzed more than 300 heart attack deaths of older men that happened during week-long vacations in the Austrian mountains, between 5,000 and 6,000 feet above sea level. About 40% died while doing cross-country, downhill, or back-country skiing, and 60% died while hiking on easy terrain. Past studies have shown that men over age 34 who hike at this altitude have a fourfold higher risk of sudden death than during normal activities at low altitudes. What this new study showed is that men who slept the night before at about 2,300 feet above sea level were more than five times as likely to die on the first day as men who slept at about 4,300 feet above sea level. Researchers conclude that a period of acclimatization before recreation may reduce the triggers of heart attacks (at higher altitudes the air has a lower oxygen tension, and your heart has to work harder). In other words, if you're going to go skiing or hiking in the mountains, give yourself a day of rest first, and make sure it's at an altitude similar to the one where you're going to go and play.

There’s something satisfying about getting immediate feedback about exercise, sleep, and other activities. That’s why more and more people are joining the “quantified-self” movement. It involves formal tracking of health and habits, usually using apps and devices that feed data to them—from heart rate, activity, and sleep monitors to Bluetooth connected scales. But with so many apps and connected devices on the market, it can be hard to decide which ones are worth trying. Wellocracy, a website launched by the Harvard-affiliated Center for Connected Health, aims to give people impartial information about fitness trackers, mobile health apps, and other self-help technologies. It reviews dozens of sleep trackers, wearable activity trackers, mobile running apps, and mobile pedometer apps, lets you compare apps and devices in each category, provides a guide for beginners and offers tips for adding activity “bursts” throughout the day.

Millions of baseball fans will tune in tonight for the opening game of the World Series. Boston Red Sox versus St. Louis Cardinals. Sportswriters are saying it will be an interesting series between two well-matched teams. Football fans have it easy. They have to sit through just one big game to decide the year’s champion. For us baseball fans, it could take seven games spread over nine days to determine this year’s champion. That means fans need to approach the series as a marathon, not a sprint. Pay attention to sleep, exercise, food, alcohol, and emotions. The Red Sox and Cardinals are two very likable teams. Commentators point out that these guys play the game the “right way.” The players themselves say it’s going to be fun. Let’s see if we fans can remember that baseball is a game. This World Series should be fun to watch. Whoever you’re rooting for, have fun watching.

Having obstructive sleep apnea puts you at risk for a number of conditions, including high blood pressure and stroke. New guidelines from the American College of Physicians (ACP) emphasize lifestyle modifications for treating obstructive sleep apnea to prevent those conditions. The guidelines don’t offer any radical treatment updates, but they do reinforce the effectiveness of tried and true therapies. The first recommendation is weight loss for people who are overweight and obese. The link between excess weight and sleep apnea is well established. The second recommendation is using continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP. This is typically the first-line treatment because weight loss can be so hard to achieve.