File: Among The Sleep Enhanced Edition.zip ...

Scientists and philosophers have long wondered why people sleep and how it affects the brain. Sleep is important for storing memories. It also has a restorative function. Lack of sleep impairs reasoning, problem-solving, and attention to detail, among other effects. However, the mechanisms behind these sleep benefits have been unknown.

File: Among the Sleep Enhanced Edition.zip ...

There is disagreement on how much sleep debt is possible to accumulate, and whether sleep debt is accumulated against an individual's average sleep or some other benchmark. It is also unclear whether the prevalence of sleep debt among adults has changed appreciably in the industrialized world in recent decades. Sleep debt does show some evidence of being cumulative. Subjectively, however, humans seem to reach maximum sleepiness 30 hours after waking.[30] It is likely that in Western societies, children are sleeping less than they previously have.[38]

Human sleep-needs vary by age and amongst individuals;[67] sleep is considered to be adequate when there is no daytime sleepiness or dysfunction.[68] Moreover, self-reported sleep duration is only moderately correlated with actual sleep time as measured by actigraphy,[69] and those affected with sleep state misperception may typically report having slept only four hours despite having slept a full eight hours.[70][71][72]

Children can greatly benefit from a structured bedtime routine. This can look differently among families, but will generally consist of a set of rituals such as reading a bedtime story, a bath, brushing teeth, and can also include a show of affection from the parent to the child such a hug or kiss before bed. A bedtime routine will also include a consistent time that the child is expected to be in bed ready for sleep. Having a reliable bedtime routine can help improve a child's quality of sleep as well as prepare them to make and keep healthy sleep hygiene habits in the future.[89]

Low quality sleep has been linked with health conditions like cardiovascular disease, obesity, and mental illness. While poor sleep is common among those with cardiovascular disease, some research indicates that poor sleep can be a contributing cause. Short sleep duration of less than seven hours is correlated with coronary heart disease and increased risk of death from coronary heart disease. Sleep duration greater than nine hours is also correlated with coronary heart disease, as well as stroke and cardiovascular events.[123][124][125][126]

Historian A. Roger Ekirch thinks that the traditional pattern of "segmented sleep," as it is called, began to disappear among the urban upper class in Europe in the late 17th century and the change spread over the next 200 years; by the 1920s "the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness."[147][148] Ekirch attributes the change to increases in "street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses," which slowly made nighttime a legitimate time for activity, decreasing the time available for rest.[148] Today in most societies people sleep during the night, but in very hot climates they may sleep during the day.[149] During Ramadan, many Muslims sleep during the day rather than at night.[150]

Primary central sleep apnea mostly affects middle-aged or elderly individuals. CSB-CSA increases in prevalence among individuals older than 60 years. [13] Age distribution in other central sleep apnea syndromes is unknown

Objective To determine the effects of a sleep extension intervention on objectively assessed energy intake, energy expenditure, and body weight in real-life settings among adults with overweight who habitually curtailed their sleep duration.

Conclusions and Relevance This trial found that sleep extension reduced energy intake and resulted in a negative energy balance in real-life settings among adults with overweight who habitually curtailed their sleep duration. Improving and maintaining healthy sleep duration over longer periods could be part of obesity prevention and weight loss programs.

Sleep disturbances are a common reaction to stress and are linked to a host of physical and mental health problems. Given the unprecedented demands placed on U.S. military forces since 2001, there has been growing concern about the prevalence and consequences of sleep problems for servicemembers. Sleep problems often follow a chronic course, persisting long after servicemembers return home from combat deployments, with consequences for their reintegration and the readiness and resiliency of the force. Therefore, it is critical to understand the role of sleep problems in servicemembers' health and functioning and the policies and programs available to promote healthy sleep. This report provides the first comprehensive review of sleep-related policies and programs across the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), along with a set of actionable recommendations for DoD, commanders, researchers, and medical professionals who treat U.S. servicemembers. The two-year multimethod study also examined the rates and correlates of sleep problems among post-deployed servicemembers, finding negative effects on mental health, daytime impairment, and perceived operational readiness. The research reviewed evidence-based interventions to treat sleep disturbances among servicemembers and veterans and exposed several individual- and system-level barriers to achieving healthy sleep. Implementing evidence-based treatments is just one step toward improving sleep across the force; as the research recommendations highlight, it is equally important that policies and programs also focus on preventing sleep problems and their consequences.

Along this line, most animal studies have consistently shown a role in particular for IL-1, TNF-α, and PGD2 in the physiologic, homeostatic non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep regulation, so that the inhibition of their biological action resulted in decreased spontaneous NREM sleep, whereas their administration enhanced NREM sleep amount and intensity, and suppressed rapid eye movement (REM) sleep51,52,53. Moreover, the circulating levels of IL-1, IL-6, TNF-α, and PGD2 are highest during sleep54. Their effects are dose- and time-of-day-dependent so that, for instance, low doses of IL-1 enhance NREMS, whereas high doses inhibit sleep55. Reciprocal effects may be involved in sleep regulation: for instance, the effects of systemic bacterial products such as LPS may also involve TNF-α49. Links exist between IL-1β and GHRH/growth hormone (GH) in promoting sleep so that IL-1 induced GH release via GHRH56, and hypothalamic γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA)ergic neurons (promoting sleep) are responsive to both GHRH and IL-1β57. Instead, anti-inflammatory cytokines, including IL-4, IL-10, and IL-13, inhibited NREM sleep in animal models58.

Through these substances, the immune system may signal to the brain and interact with other factors involved in sleep regulation such as neurotransmitters (acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and histamine), neuropeptides (orexin), nucleosides (adenosine), the hormone melatonin, and the hypothalamus-pituitary axis (HPA) axis. Signaling mechanisms to the brain also involve vagal afferents: for instance, vagotomy attenuates intraperitoneal TNF-α-enhanced NREMS responses59.

To determine where jnk-1 function was required, we used tissue-specific knockdown by RNAi. Feeding C. elegans bacteria that express double-stranded RNA for a C. elegans gene is effective to knock down target mRNAs in most somatic tissues. However, neurons are among the few tissues that are refractory to this approach. Expression of the double-stranded RNA channel SID-1 in neurons renders them more sensitive to RNAi by feeding [16]. Previous work demonstrated that RNAi knockdown of jnk-1 in animals expressing neuronal SID-1 resulted in increased total time in sleep bouts and recapitulated the defects seen in jnk-1(gk7) animals [8]. We suspected that jnk-1 might function in neurons. We tested this hypothesis by generating transgenic animals expressing jnk-1 cDNA under a pan-neuronal promoter into jnk-1(gk7) animals. We found that restoring jnk-1 expression in neurons was sufficient to restore sleep bouts to wild type levels (Fig. 5d). We also tested this hypothesis using animals that do not express ectopic SID-1 in neurons. In these animals, jnk-1 RNAi knockdown had no impact on total sleep bout number or L4/A lethargus duration (Additional file 8: Fig. 5, Additional file 5: Raw Data File). Confirmation of RNAi knockdown was not undertaken and it is possible that jnk-1 levels were not decreased and we cannot rule out a role for JNK-1 outside the nervous system. However, these independent rescue and RNAi results suggest that loss of jnk-1 function in neurons likely leads to increased sleep bouts and decreased response times during L4/A lethargus sleep bouts.

Abstract:Poor sleep quality is a risk factor for multiple mental, cardiovascular, and cerebrovascular diseases. Certain sleep positions or excessive position changes can be related to some diseases and poor sleep quality. Nevertheless, sleep position is usually classified into four discrete values: supine, prone, left and right. An increase in sleep position resolution is necessary to better assess sleep position dynamics and to interpret more accurately intermediate sleep positions. This research aims to study the feasibility of smartphones as sleep position monitors by (1) developing algorithms to retrieve the sleep position angle from smartphone accelerometry; (2) monitoring the sleep position angle in patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA); (3) comparing the discretized sleep angle versus the four classic sleep positions obtained by the video-validated polysomnography (PSG); and (4) analyzing the presence of positional OSA (pOSA) related to its sleep angle of occurrence. Results from 19 OSA patients reveal that a higher resolution sleep position would help to better diagnose and treat patients with position-dependent diseases such as pOSA. They also show that smartphones are promising mHealth tools for enhanced position monitoring at hospitals and home, as they can provide sleep position with higher resolution than the gold-standard video-validated PSG.Keywords: accelerometry; biomedical signal processing; mHealth; monitoring; sleep apnea; sleep position; smartphone 041b061a72