8 Hours

Australian researchers have reported on tests of a 25-hour intensive sleep program for retraining sleep habits. 

Essentially the sleep boot camp teaches people how to fall asleep quickly.  The subject spends 25 hours in a sleep lab.  They are woken up after 3 minutes of sleep. This creates the experience of sleep deprivation which causes the subject to learn how to fall asleep quickly when given the chance.

Researcher Julie L. Wei MD, of the University of Kansas School of Medicine and colleagues found improvements in sleep and behavior with a questonnaire-based study administered at 6-months and 2-years post surgery.  The study of 71 children was published in the Archives of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery.

The study not only found improvement in sleep-disordered breathing, but further research has supported a finding that sleep-disordered breathing has a significant impact on children’s behavior and cognitive development over the longer term including improvement with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD.)

Many men with prostate cancer suffer from insomnia, depression and distress according to a small study published in the August issue of Applied Nursing Research.

Men who receive radiation therapy are not surprisingly most at risk for insomnia. One surprise is that tha younger men are a higher risk than older men. In the study, 53 percent of the men reported significant insomnia, 45 percent had trouble falling asleep, 28 percent had trouble staying asleep. Quite a high number of the men, 51 percent of the men were clinically depressed.

Sleep apnea in infants is extremely stressful not only for the child, but also for parents watching their children suffer and worrying that they will stop breathing. A small pilot study conducted in Belgium points to the potential for using osteopathy for relief of obstructive apnea in babies.

Osteopathy is an approach to medical treatment that involves various methods of manipulating the musculoskeletal system. It is currently much more accepted as a separate field of medicine Europe than in the U.S. and Canada. Osteopaths use their hands to manupulate joints, soft tissues, muscles, fasciae and the skeleton to bring relief to problems such as back pain, neck pain, headaches and asthma.

In this study, infants who received only 2 treatments showed significant measurable improvement - meaning a decrease in the number of obstructive apnea incidents in an 8-hour period.

This study is promising not just for the possibility of treating obstructive apnea in infants, but also might be a possible treatment for apnea sufferers of all ages.

Sleeping less than seven and a half hours per day may be associated with future risk of heart disease, according to a new article. In addition, a combination of little sleep and overnight elevated blood pressure appears to be associated with an increased risk of the disease.

"Reflecting changing lifestyles, people are sleeping less in modern societies," according to background information in the article. Getting adequate sleep is essential to preventing health conditions such as obesity and diabetes as well as several risk factors for cardiovascular disease including sleep-disordered breathing and night-time hypertension (high blood pressure).

Kazuo Eguchi, M.D., Ph.D., at Jichi Medical University, Tochigi, Japan, and colleagues monitored the sleep of 1,255 individuals with hypertension (average age 70.4) and followed them for an average of 50 months. Researchers noted patients' sleep duration, daytime and nighttime blood pressure and cardiovascular disease events such as stroke, heart attack and sudden cardiac death.

The National Sleep Foundation (NSF) released a report on Nov. 11, 2008 arguing that "poor police training, a lack of educational materials, and meager data collection are hindering efforts to increase awareness about the dangers of drowsy driving in the United States and aggressively tackle the problem, a new report finds." The report was released in anticipation of the NSF Drowsy Driving Prevention Week, Nov. 10-16.

"States across the nation seem to be trying to increase their efforts to combat drowsy driving, especially in the area of graduated licensing laws for young drivers," CEO David Cloud said in a sleep foundation news release. "However, due to a lack of awareness of the serious repercussions of drowsy driving and a lack of accurate reporting, state officials don't have the data they need to support increased efforts to aggressively address driver fatigue. Drivers, parents, educators, employers and government officials alike need to start taking drowsy driving more seriously."

The promotion of regular sleep is known as sleep hygiene. The following is a list of sleep hygiene tips which can be used to improve sleep. Also included is a list of special relevance to adolescents, who may experience sleep difficulties due to circadian rhythm changes occurring during the teenage years and into young adulthood.

Adults:

Go to bed at the same time each night and rise at the same time each morning.

Make sure your bedroom is a quiet, dark, and relaxing environment, which is neither too hot or too cold.

Make sure your bed is comfortable and use it only for sleeping and not for other activities, such as reading, watching TV, or listening to music. Remove all TVs, computers, and other “gadgets” from the bedroom.

Physical activity may help promote sleep, but not within a few hours of bedtime.

Avoid large meals before bedtime.

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic have observed associations between sleep disorders and eye disease. According to an article in the November issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings.  The link seems to involve the vascular impairments associated with sleep apnea.

Multiple studies have identified sleep apnea as an independent risk factor for the development of several medical conditions, including high blood pressure, which are related to impairments or alterations in a person's vascular (circulatory) system. With their own complex and sensitive vascular system, the eyes can sometimes signal and be affected by systemic vascular problems.

"Given the vascular consequences of OSA, it is not surprising that ophthalmologic manifestations exist," explains the article's lead author, E. Andrew Waller, M.D., a Mayo Clinic pulmonologist and sleep specialist.

It's breathtaking to realize that surgical interns still work 30-hour shifts and 80-hour plus weeks.  Would you want your airplane pilot to be flying you and your family at the end of his 30-hour shift?  I wouldn't even trust the guy at Starbucks to make a decent cup of coffee at the end of a 30-hour shift.  Why then do we not object when young surgeons are allowed to cut people open and perform complex surgery at the end of a 30-hour shift?

There are two main reasons this ridiculous system continues:  1.  The hospital saves money and 2. Surgeons are macho.   The old surgeons will brag that back in their day they had to work 50-hour shifts and the stay-awake drugs weren't as good as today's. The hospitals claim the young surgeons learn more when it's thrown at them all at once (plus the hospital saves money).

Obviously no one asked the patients.

This very small studies points to earlier  deaths among stroke victims who have sleep apnea. The study group is made up of only 151 patients, but this certainly points to a need for a much larger study.  It's possible that lives could be saved if sleep apnea was diagnosed and/or treated concurrent with the stroke itself.

Obstructive Sleep Apnea Is a Risk Factor for Death in Patients With Stroke
A 10-Year Follow-up

Background  Sleep apnea occurs frequently among patients with stroke, but it is still unknown whether a diagnosis of sleep apnea is an independent risk factor for mortality. We aimed to investigate whether obstructive or central sleep apnea was related to reduced long-term survival among patients with stroke.