Sleep Archive

Do you have trouble sleeping? If you’re carrying extra pounds, especially around your belly, losing weight and some of that muffin top may help you get better ZZZs. So say researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who presented their findings at this year’s annual meeting of the American Heart Association. In a six-month trial that included 77 overweight volunteers, weight loss through diet plus exercise or diet alone improved sleep. A reduction in belly fat was the best predictor of improved sleep. Among people who are overweight, weight loss can reduce sleep apnea, a nighttime breathing problem that leads to frequent awakenings. Exercise has also been shown to improve sleep quality. Despite what thousands of websites want you to believe, there are no exercises or potions that “melt away” belly fat. Instead, the solution is old-fashioned exercise and a healthy diet.

A bad night's sleep can leave you feeling pretty tired the next day. Put a string of those together and nagging fatigue starts to set in.

Getting good sleep, in the right amount, can make a big difference in how you feel. Too little or too much sleep can increase your perception of fatigue. And even if you get enough hours of sleep, you might find yourself dragging the next day if that sleep was interrupted by frequent awakenings or was of poor quality.

The sleep-robbing condition known as restless legs syndrome (RLS) raises the risk of heart disease in older women about as much as smoking and obesity, according to a new Harvard-based study published online in the journal Circulation. The key sign of RLS is an irresistible urge to move the legs, often accompanied by an uncomfortable “creepy-crawly” sensation. It affects about 2% of adults and is twice as common in women as in men. Symptoms typically flare as people settle into bed, but may also arise when simply resting in a chair or sitting at a desk. Most people with RLS also experience periodic jerking leg motions during sleep. Uncovering this link could help people with RLS pay better attention to their cardiovascular health and potentially ward off a heart attack, stroke, or other cardiovascular condition.

Q. I often fly on business from Chicago to Europe. Do you have any tips for managing jet lag?

A. Jet lag is common when flying long distance across several time zones. For every time zone you cross, it takes about a day for your body to adjust. There is no proven solution for jet lag, but you may be able to minimize its effects.

Now there are more comfortable ways to correct the disordered breathing that disrupts your slumber.

There's good news for anyone with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). For one, more people can undergo sleep testing at home, making diagnosis more comfortable and convenient. On the treatment side, there are additional choices besides continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), which many people use inconsistently despite doctors' warnings. Finally, although excess body weight plays a central role in OSA, it also means you can kick apnea for good with lifestyle change.

Tired of feeling tired? Here are some simple tips to help you get to sleep.

Medical conditions that wake you up can potentially lead to increased recall of dreams—including disturbing ones. A person who wakes up during the dreaming phase of sleep is "closer" to the dream and will therefore recall it more vividly. As for late-night eating directly causing nightmares, small studies of individuals who ate immediately before sleep have not shown a consistent relationship.

However, nocturnal eating can interrupt your sleep in various ways, prompting recall of disturbing dreams by the mechanism described above. For example, eating a large meal, especially a high-carbohydrate meal, could trigger night sweats because the body generates heat as it metabolizes the food. Also, gastroesophageal reflux (GERD), caused by lying down with a full stomach, may trigger symptoms that wake you up.

What is blue light? The effect blue light has on your sleep and more.

Although it is environmentally friendly, blue light can affect your sleep and potentially cause disease. Until the advent of artificial lighting, the sun was the major source of lighting, and people spent their evenings in (relative) darkness. Now, in much of the world, evenings are illuminated, and we take our easy access to all those lumens pretty much for granted.

But we may be paying a price for basking in all that light. At night, light throws the body's biological clock—the circadian rhythm—out of whack. Sleep suffers. Worse, research shows that it may contribute to the causation of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.

Sleeping poorly night after night—because you are trying to burn the candle at both ends or you work night or rotating shifts—has long-term health consequences. People who don’t average at least six hours of sleep a night are more likely to be overweight or develop various medical problems. New research from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital shows that lack of sleep plays a complex and powerful role in the development of type 2 diabetes. Among volunteers who lived in a sleep lab for several weeks, their bodies made less insulin after meals when they got under 5.5 hours of sleep a night for three weeks. As a result, their blood sugar levels went haywire. Some of the people had blood sugar levels high enough to have been diagnosed as prediabetic.

Women with severe obstructive sleep apnea may be at increased risk of dying from a cardiovascular event such as a stroke or heart attack, and treatment with a therapy called continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, may reduce that risk. These are the findings of the first study to examine the relationship between obstructive sleep apnea and cardiovascular death exclusively in women. Obstructive sleep apnea causes pauses in breathing during sleep, with symptoms that include snoring and daytime sleepiness. Studies have shown that severe apnea raises the risk of fatal cardiovascular events in men, and that CPAP is protective, but until now, data on women have been lacking. Results were published in the Jan. 17, 2012, issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

The study. The participants were 1,116 women (average age 57) referred to sleep clinics at two hospitals in Spain between 1998 and 2007. All of the women underwent sleep studies to determine whether they had obstructive sleep apnea. If they did, and if it was sufficiently severe (scoring 30 or higher on a measure called the apnea-hypopnea index, or AHI) or was moderate but accompanied by daytime sleepiness, the women were offered CPAP treatment. CPAP use was tracked by reading a time counter on the device. On the basis of the sleep study and CPAP recommendations, participants were divided into five groups: those without sleep apnea, those with mild to moderate sleep apnea treated with CPAP, those with severe sleep apnea treated with CPAP, those with mild to moderate sleep apnea not treated with CPAP, and those with severe sleep apnea not treated with CPAP. The women were monitored for six years.