Archive for July, 2008

If your sleep is being interrupted by the annoying habit of snoring, learning different ways to get better snoring relief is the best solution for your problem.

However, certain extreme circumstances or loud snoring, gasping breaths imply more serious health condition and need immediate and effective medical treatment.

Fortunately, getting better snoring relief is not as tough as you think. You can make these simple and necessary lifestyle changes to get better snoring relief.

Change your sleep position!

Usually snoring mainly takes place when the soft palate, tongue, tonsils, uvula and other muscles in your back throat rub each other and as a result generates a vibrating sound during sleep. Snoring occurs only when you lie on back and your tongue falls back.

So, if you are among those snorers who lie on their back, sleep on your sides that will help you to get better snoring relief.

Avoid alcohol and other sedatives!

Anything that causes sedation such as low dose alcohol or sleeping pills also causes snoring, as they tend to suppress your breathing process. So, avoid drinking alcohol or using other sedatives to get better sleep, in turn to stop snoring during your sleep.

Girls moving through adolescence may experience unhealthy levels of weight gain, but the reasons for this are not always clear.

In fact, many potential causes of weight gain are easily overlooked.

A new study analyzes the effect of Internet usage, sleep, and alcohol and coffee consumption on weight gain in adolescent girls.

Dr. Catherine Berkey and colleagues from Harvard Medical School, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and Washington University led the Growing Up Today Study (GUTS), which surveyed more than 5000 girls between the ages of 14 and 21 years from all 50 states.

They asked the girls to reflect on their weekly habits over the past year and report the following: 1) hours of sleep per night; 2) time spent on the Internet (excluding time for work or school); 3) number of alcoholic beverages consumed;[Effects of alcohol on sleep] and 4) number of coffee beverages consumed.

The girls also reported their height and weight at the beginning and end of the one-year study.

The researchers found that more Internet time, more alcohol consumption, and less sleep resulted in extra weight gain during the study year.

According to the recent research, sleep apnea is usually considered more as a disorder in older men, but this is also prevalent in older women, particularly those who have reached menopausal state.

Menopause, despite of age is linked with poor sleep quality and sleep problems like sleep apnea.

These types of sleep problems are thought to be linked with hormonal functioning and also with psychological factors.

Hot flashes, the main symptom of menopause, that occur during sleep have the great ability to affect your sleep qualityby bringing you from a deeper and more restful stage of sleep to a lighter, restorative and less restful stage.

Hot flashes before going to bed can also cause insomnia. But, frequently the causes of insomnia associated with menopause are mainly due to increased anxiety and depression and these can greatly affect the time it takes to fall asleep.

In a premenopausal woman, the occurrence of sleep-disordered breathing, apnea and snoring are quite small, but these appear to rise dramatically after menopause.

But, according to the recent research, the menopausal effects on sleep apnea and snoring are mainly due to increased weight and age other than directly from changes in hormones of menopause stage.

According to new study by Australian researchers, a lack of sleep can have a bad affect on the ability of children to both learn and interact at school.

The new study by researchers from the Centre for Community Child Health at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Melbourne, has revealed that nearly a quarter of children aged six and seven have poor sleeping habits, which has a major effect on their health, behaviour and learning ability.

The researchers said that almost 25% of six and seven year olds have trouble sleeping and those with the most persistent sleep issues suffer the most serious health, behavior and learning problems according to their parents and teachers.

According to the researchers, a lack of sleep affects concentration and how children interact with peers and teachers.

They say previous research had shown children are more likely to drop out of school if they had a poor early transition to formal education and if they have enough sleep children are able to make the transition and take on the workload while their brains are still growing and taking in a lot of information.

Read more information at News Medical

Regular practice of tai chi chih, a Westernized version of the ancient Chinese martial art of tai chi, can help older people rest easier at night[good night sleep], according to a study in the journal Sleep.

Studies show that more than half of older adults experience sleeping problems at least a few times a week, Irwin and his team note in their report.

Nearly two-thirds of people who learned the slow, gentle tai chi chih moves experienced significant improvements in sleep quality, compared to about one-third of those who participated in health education sessions that included information on how to get a better night’s rest.

In fact, the benefits of tai chi chih were similar to those seen with drugs or cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), study chief Dr. Michael R. Irwin of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA told Reuters Health.

To investigate whether tai chi chih might be an option, Irwin and his team analyzed sleep quality in 112 people aged 59 to 86 participating in a randomized, controlled trial of the martial art for preventing shingles. Tai chi chih instruction was given in 45-minute sessions, three times a week.

According to research by Rush University Medical Center, difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep increase as women go through menopause .

Waking up earlier than planned also increases through late perimenopause but decreases when women become postmenopausal.

“Sleep difficulties, especially problems staying asleep[sleep problems], are relatively prevalent concerns among women going through the menopausal transition,” said Dr. Howard Kravitz, associate professor of psychiatry and preventive medicine at Rush University Medical Center and a principal investigator of the study.

“Approximately 16% of postmenopausal women report having difficulty falling asleep and 41% report waking up frequently during the night.”

Compared with other ethnic groups, Caucasian women were more likely to report difficulty staying asleep, while Hispanic women were less likely than other ethnic groups to wake several times during the night.

Hispanic women were also significantly less likely to report waking early than other ethnic group. Compared with Hispanic, Caucasian, African American and Japanese women, Chinese women were more likely to report early morning awakening.

In naturally postmenopausal women, women who were on hormone therapy had less trouble falling asleep and waking several times during the night than naturally postmenopausal women not on hormone therapy.

Did you notice your kid grinding teeth severely in sleep? This type of grinding teeth in sleep or during extreme stress conditions is commonly referred as bruxism.

If you are anxious about bruxism in your kid, then don’t need to be because this is the most common condition experienced by many children and it doesn’t cause any serious harm to your kid’s health.

However, teeth grinding is mainly caused when you experience severe stress or anxiety.

Usually, bruxism happens in sleep and often caused by abnormal biting or crooked teeth. Not only children, even adults can experience this sort of teeth grinding at sometime in their life.

How does bruxism affect your kid’s tooth health?

Normally, bruxism doesn’t cause any harm to your child’s teeth. Most of the bruxism cases usually go undetected without any adverse effects. But, at times, your kid can experience mild earache or morning headaches.

However, the grinding sound made by your kid can become most bothersome issue for you and also for your other family members.

If your kid is experiencing extreme levels of bruxism, it can lead to increased temperature sensitivity, chip teeth and also results in diminishing of tooth enamel.