Archive for the 'Sleep Disorder News' Category

According to the Researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, it has been proved that adolescents who are suffering with chronic insomnia not only lose their sleep, but also their health.

There are several types of health problems which affect the adolescents if they are prone to chronic insomnia.

Insomnia is common and chronic among the adolescents.

It has negative impact on the adolescents who are aged between 11 to 17 years.

The research has also found that out of 100 percent, 70 percent of adolescents who are aged between 11 to 17 years have this problem of chronic insomnia. Therefore, it is the most common problem among the adolescents.

The studies also showed that adolescents who have this chronic insomnia are affected with some psychiatric disorders like anxiety, mood, substance abuse and disruptive disorders. Other than this psychiatric health, normal health of your adolescent will also be affected.

The impact of the chronic insomnia in the future health cannot be determined at that adolescence stage itself because in some cases it will have severe impact, where as in some other cases it will have much less impact.

Not getting enough sleep has been linked to overweight and obesity. Lack of sleep can change your body’s metabolism and hormonal function. Lack of sleep also alters mood, decreases motor and mental skills. It also affects other hormones such as leptin and ghrelin.

Sleep and weight gain

Leptin and ghrelin are hormones that help your body to control appetite, weight gain and weight loss. Leptin tends to decrease appetite and ghrelin tends to increase appetite.

When you have chronic sleep loss, ghrelin levels increase, causing to increase your appetite and leptin levels decrease.

When your appetite increases, you crave for high energy foods like sweets, chocolates and ice creams. As your leptin levels decrease, you think that you are hungrier than you need to be.

Getting a good night sleep improves your mood and alertness level. If you have sleepless nights from many days, you are chronically sleep deprived. Chronic sleep disruption can result in heart and kidney diseases apart from other health problems.

Sleep deprivation activates sympathetic nervous system, resulting in constriction of blood vessels. Therefore, it raises your blood pressure. Chronic sleep deprivation also affects blood sugar regulation.

More insulin is necessary for keeping blood sugar normal if you are sleep deprived. Poor blood sugar regulation and increased levels of insulin are main contributors of cardiovascular disease.

When you are sleep deprived, kidney tubules can sustain significant scarring, leading to kidney disease. Sleep deprivation can also cause other problems like high blood pressure, diabetes and depression.

Different types of allergies can keep your children awake. These allergies cause itchy eyes, watery nose, and sneezing. When your child has these symptoms with allergies, their sleep is disturbed.

With disturbed sleep, their daily functioning such as performance in school, mood, energy, concentration and ability to think are affected.

One can affect with allergies from environment or from the food your child eats. Allergic rhinitis, a common child allergy, is an inflammation of nasal passages that occurs when your child’s body over reacts to an allergen such as pollen, dust mites, dander etc.

When swelling of nasal passages takes place, air flow is blocked, causing congestion. Nasal congestion can affect child’s sleep in many ways. Nasal congestion makes difficulty in breathing through nose.

Women are more likely to have difficulty in staying and falling asleep than men and experience more day time sleepiness.

Cardiovascular disease is one of the leading causes of deaths among women and sleep is one of the risk factors. Fifty percent of sleep problems are due to stress. Stress in women is related to work related issues, family and child related issues.

Poor sleep can result in heart disease and heart disease can contribute to poor sleep. Lack of sleep is also linked with heart failure, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, stroke, heart attack, obesity and diabetes.

All these factors are linked to each other with inflammation. It is the response of the body to injury, irritation, infection or disease.

Americans are working over time than the average work per day. As the productivity and competition are increasing, the work burden on each individual is increasing. Deadlines are given to complete that work.

To meet these deadlines, many people take the work to home apart from working full time at the job. After working fulltime at the job, you reach home. After reaching home, you have to look after your children, cook for all of them and make the home clean.

Snoring is thought to be disturbing the partner or other family members or it can cause lack of sleep. But, according to the new Research by Hungarian scientists, snoring can damage your arteries, which can result in stroke.

When you suffer from snoring, your tongue falls back into the throat. If your throat is completely blocked, you cannot be able to breathe for few seconds. Your blood pressure rises when you struggle to breathe. Elevated blood pressure can damage your carotid arteries that line the sides of the neck.

Calcium and cholesterol are attracted by injured areas, which stick to them and gather into calcified plaques. These plaques block flow of blood to the brain, resulting in stroke.

Sleep problems are common among children. As a parent, you will always worry how to make your child sleep all the night. Some children have chronic sleep problems, which makes them, sleep deprived.

Some of the signs to identify child’s sleep problem

• If your child wakes up frequently during night
• If your child snores loudly or face difficulty in breathing while asleep
• If you spend too much time to help your child in falling asleep
• If your child’s mood, behavior and school performance varies
• If you are losing sleep due to your child’s sleeping patterns
• If your child begins to wet the bed

In REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, children wake up crying. You feel that they need help and attend your child. You try to help your child sleep by rocking, feeding, holding or lying down with your child. Therefore, this becomes a habit and your child depends on you to fall asleep.