all sleep stories

Older adults found to fare better under sleep deprivation than younger adults

50443248 — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:05:46 -0400

In a recent sleep study testing alertness and performance in sleep-deprived adults, researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) determined that healthy older adults handle sleep deprivation better than younger adults. The findings appeared online on May 3, in an advance online edition of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

After an extended period of wakefulness, older participants were less impaired by sleep deprivation, showed faster reaction times and fewer performance lapses, paid better attention, and had less frequent unintentional sleep episodes than their younger counterparts.

Obesity linked to dangerous sleep apnea in truck drivers

50443248 — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:31:00 -0400

Truck crashes are a significant public health hazard, causing thousands of deaths and injuries each year, with driver fatigue and sleepiness being major causes. A new study by Harvard researchers has confirmed previous findings that obesity-driven testing strategies identify commercial truck drivers with a high likelihood of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and suggests that mandating OSA screenings could reduce the risk of truck crashes.

Researchers find potential cause of heart risks for shift workers

50443248 — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:58:22 -0500

Harvard researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and colleagues have identified the potential cause of the increased risk for cardiovascular and metabolic disease in shift workers.

Shift workers most impaired on first night shift following day shifts

404132862 — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 16:21:17 -0500

Researchers at Harvard Medical School affiliate Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have found that the attention of shift workers is most impaired on the first night shift following a string of day shifts. This research appears in the November 28, 2007 edition of the Public Library of Science ONE.

Sleep found to repair and reorganize the brain

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:53:43 -0400

Most of us do it every night but we don't know why. If you miss too many nights, it might kill you.

We know why we eat, drink, breathe, and move around, but no one can explain why we need to sleep. What does seven or eight hours of snoozing really do for us? Van Savage at the Harvard Medical School and Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico believe they have found a good answer.

One favorite explanation is that sleep is for resting the body. But as Steven Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell University wisely points out, lying still for eight hours is no substitute for this strange state in which we spend decades of our lives "immobilized, unconscious, and vulnerable."

Sleeping your way to heart health

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:43:16 -0400

A new Harvard School of Public Health study indicates that there's more than just olive oil and red wine keeping heart disease rates down in Mediterranean countries. There's the naps, too.

A study that followed more than 23,000 people for six years showed that regular napping can cut deaths from heart disease by as much as 37 percent, providing a benefit in the same order of magnitude as that linked to lowering cholesterol, eating a healthy diet, or exercising.

Study shows importance of sleep for optimal memory functioning

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:46:32 -0400

Harvard researchers have tracked fatigue's footsteps on the human brain, showing that sleeplessness impairs the ability to learn new information and that abnormal brain function, not reduced alertness, is the cause.

The study, released in the journal Nature Neuroscience, adds a new wrinkle to the unfolding story of the importance of sleep for memory function and builds on earlier studies that show that sleep deprivation after an event also impairs memory formation.

The study found that student volunteers who had been awake for 35 hours before viewing images performed an average of 19 percent worse remembering those images two days later, after catching up on their sleep.

Interns get stuck on long shifts

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 12:16:44 -0400

Overly tired interns working in hospitals make mistakes that endanger themselves as well as patients. A new Harvard study has found that doctors in their first year of training stick themselves with needles and cut themselves with scalpels and broken glass at an increased rate during night shifts and after working 20 or more consecutive hours.

A previous Harvard investigation showed that interns double their odds of getting into an automobile crash on their commute home after a 24-hour shift or during a typical 80-hour week. Such hours are not uncommon among the estimated 100,000 doctor-trainees in the United States.

Melatonin most effective for sleep when taken for off-hour sleeping

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:27:03 -0400

Researchers from the Divisions of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School have found in a double-blind placebo-controlled clinical study that melatonin, taken orally during non-typical sleep times, significantly improves an individual's ability to sleep.

This finding is particularly important for rotating or night-shift workers, travelers with jet lag and individuals with advanced or delayed sleep phase syndrome.

The findings appear in the May 1, 2006 issue of the journal Sleep.

"Melatonin enabled these participants to obtain an extra half hour of sleep when they attempted to do so during the day, at a time when they were not producing melatonin themselves," said Charles Czeisler, chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and HMS and senior author of the study. "Melatonin did not help these young adults sleep at night, when their body was already producing melatonin. These findings have implications for millions of people who attempt to sleep at a time that is out of synch with the brain's internal clock."

The research was supported by the National Institute on Aging, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

When the blues keep you awake

50443248 — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 12:50:17 -0400

Your eyes do more than see.
Researchers at Harvard Medical School demonstrated this by showing that your eyes are part of a light reception system that can keep you alert when sleep starts to fog your brain. When the researchers exposed people to blue light at night, this system immediately increased their alertness and performance on tests.

Waking up to how we sleep and dream

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:42:25 -0400

The Oct. 27, 2005 issue of the prestigious science journal Nature devotes almost 40 pages to bringing readers up-to-date on what happens during sleep. Three of the articles are by Harvard Medical School scientists who discuss such things as an on-off sleep switch, and learning while we sleep.

Clifford Saper, James Jackson Putnam Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience, and his colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center study key nerve circuits that switch us from waking to sleeping and back. Two small clusters of nerve cells in the hypothalamus, a cherry-size area behind the eyes, shut down our arousal circuits when we sleep. The switch is turned back on by the time of day and the length of time spent awake before going to bed.

Investigating phenomenon of sleep

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:42:05 -0400

Alexander Schier's transparent fish are helping him understand the basic secrets of human development: how early embryonic cells communicate so that some develop into heart tissue, some into brain cells, and others into tissues that form the rest of the body.

Zebrafish, though striped as adults, are transparent when embryos, making them attractive to researchers because scientists can literally look inside them and watch how they develop.

Schier is using his fish model to investigate the phenomenon of sleep. Though all of us do it, nobody really understands why. The need for sleep varies widely in the animal kingdom, but science hasn't yet figured out why shutting down our waking consciousness for such a large part of every day is so crucial to our well-being.

Schier suspects the need for sleep is linked to repair and restoration and makes us more ready to face the challenges of the coming day.

Schier and members of his lab are observing the fish's behavior. The fish are active for 14 hours per day and go through the zebrafish equivalent of sleep, where their activity is reduced and responses to stimuli slowed, for 10 hours.

Researchers are first observing the fish's normal sleeping behavior and keeping an eye out for mutants - fish who either sleep more or less than others. Once the mutants are identified, the investigation will turn to the genetic code of those fish, where researchers will look for genes that are different from those of "normal" fish.

"We don't really know why we have to sleep, why animals have to rest," Schier said. "[Sleep regulation] is a major question in human health."

Research in brief

50443248 — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 16:23:17 -0400

Dramatic gains for American Indians

Identified for decades as the poorest group in the United States, American Indians living on reservations made substantial gains, both economically and socially, during the final decade of the 20th century. A new report released by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development at the Kennedy School of Government compiles the data from the 1990 and 2000 U.S. Censuses for 15 key socioeconomic indicators. The data on measures ranging from income and poverty to unemployment, education, and housing conditions indicate that although substantial gaps remain between America's Native population and the rest of U.S. society, rapid economic and social development is taking place among gaming and non-gaming tribes alike.

Interns crash more after long shifts

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:36:49 -0400

A safety group at Harvard University has looked into the behavior of those in training in hospitals and found that overworked interns made 36 percent more serious medical errors and five times as many diagnostic mistakes during a traditional work shift than their better rested colleagues. More recently, the safety researchers checked interns' driving habits and found that their odds of crashing more than double as work hours increase. The doctors-in-training also experienced more than five times as many near misses as nonsleep-deprived drivers. "These findings are of particular concern because motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death in this age group," notes Charles Czeisler, Baldino Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Interns, men and women in their first year of residency at teaching hospitals, usually are between 24 and 32 years old. Duty hours for interns and other residents have been limited to 80 hours per week by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. However, the new standard still allows people to work for continuous stretches of 30 hours. The report appeared in the Jan. 13, 2005 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Study says therapy better than pills in treating sleep-onset insomnia

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 07:09:56 -0400

The findings show non-drug techniques yield better short- and long-term results than the most widely prescribed sleeping pill, zolpidem, commonly known as Ambien. "Sleeping pills are the most frequent treatment for insomnia, yet CBT techniques clearly were more successful in helping the majority of study participants to become normal sleepers," said study leader Gregg Jacobs.

For the study, researchers conducted a clinical trial involving young and middle-aged adults with chronic sleep-onset insomnia. Interventions included behavioral and relaxation techniques, pharmacotherapy, or combined therapy compared with placebo.

Researchers measured sleep over an eight-week period: at mid- treatment, when pharmacotherapy subjects were still taking a nightly dose of Ambien, and at the end of the period, when Ambien subjects gradually tapered their medication and then discontinued it entirely. The main measure was sleep-onset latency.

CBT and combination groups showed the greatest changes in sleep-onset latency at mid-treatment, followed by the pharmacotherapy group, which showed a slight improvement. The moderate improvements observed in the Ambien group at mid-treatment, however, were not maintained after the drug was discontinued. CBT and combined therapy also produced the best sleep efficiency and number of normal sleepers by the end of treatment. There was no advantage of combined therapy over CBT alone.