2008 Woodie Awards
Here's the latest pillow talk on having a better night's sleep
By: MCT
Issue date: 3/25/08 Section: Campus
Know somebody who likes to brag that he can get by on six hours of sleep a night?
Tell him that men who sleep less than seven hours a night have a 26 percent greater death rate over a two-decade period than men who sleep seven to eight hours a night.
And children who don't get enough sleep are more likely to be overweight and to have behavioral problems.
And people who do rotating-shift work have lower levels of the hormone serotonin, low levels of which are associated with anxiety and depression.
These findings, all published in the journal Sleep within the last seven months, are part of a rapidly expanding body of knowledge about the physiology of sleep and the importance of adequate sound sleep to good health.
"Shift work was just added to the list of risk factors for cancer by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)," says Dr. Jerrold Kram, a member of the board of directors of the National Sleep Foundation. "It just suggests the increasing recognition of how profoundly sleep affects our lives."
And it's not just arcane statistics about risk factors and sleep that are accumulating. There are 83 recognized sleep disorders, including sleep apneas, insomnias, circadian-rhythm disturbances, narcolepsy, restless leg syndrome and plain old wake-the-neighborhood snoring. Physicians like Kram are putting this knowledge to use, making sleep medicine one of the fastest- growing medical specialties over the past decade.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine accredited the first clinical sleep lab in 1977. The idea of community medical centers where patients would be hooked up to monitors while they punched their pillows, snored and dreamed about showing up for college exams naked, grew slowly at first - by 1996 there were just 300 AASM-accredited sleep centers - but the concept has exploded in the past decade, resulting in more than 1,000 accredited centers today and many more unaccredited centers.
You need all five stages of sleep.
"We used to think that sleep was a dormant period of time, and we're finding out that there are a whole lot of things that go on during sleep," says Dr. David Ostransky, a Fort Worth, Texas, pulmonology and sleep-medicine specialist.
Saying "a whole lot" goes on during sleep is like saying that war is "unpleasant."
There are five stages of sleep, according to the National Sleep Foundation, four non-REM stages and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, and sleepers cycle through the stages about every 90 to 100 minutes.
Tell him that men who sleep less than seven hours a night have a 26 percent greater death rate over a two-decade period than men who sleep seven to eight hours a night.
And children who don't get enough sleep are more likely to be overweight and to have behavioral problems.
And people who do rotating-shift work have lower levels of the hormone serotonin, low levels of which are associated with anxiety and depression.
These findings, all published in the journal Sleep within the last seven months, are part of a rapidly expanding body of knowledge about the physiology of sleep and the importance of adequate sound sleep to good health.
"Shift work was just added to the list of risk factors for cancer by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)," says Dr. Jerrold Kram, a member of the board of directors of the National Sleep Foundation. "It just suggests the increasing recognition of how profoundly sleep affects our lives."
And it's not just arcane statistics about risk factors and sleep that are accumulating. There are 83 recognized sleep disorders, including sleep apneas, insomnias, circadian-rhythm disturbances, narcolepsy, restless leg syndrome and plain old wake-the-neighborhood snoring. Physicians like Kram are putting this knowledge to use, making sleep medicine one of the fastest- growing medical specialties over the past decade.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine accredited the first clinical sleep lab in 1977. The idea of community medical centers where patients would be hooked up to monitors while they punched their pillows, snored and dreamed about showing up for college exams naked, grew slowly at first - by 1996 there were just 300 AASM-accredited sleep centers - but the concept has exploded in the past decade, resulting in more than 1,000 accredited centers today and many more unaccredited centers.
You need all five stages of sleep.
"We used to think that sleep was a dormant period of time, and we're finding out that there are a whole lot of things that go on during sleep," says Dr. David Ostransky, a Fort Worth, Texas, pulmonology and sleep-medicine specialist.
Saying "a whole lot" goes on during sleep is like saying that war is "unpleasant."
There are five stages of sleep, according to the National Sleep Foundation, four non-REM stages and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, and sleepers cycle through the stages about every 90 to 100 minutes.
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