THURSDAY, Nov. 5 (HealthDay News) — What you’re not doing once retired seems to make a good night’s sleep come more easily.
A study of nearly 15,000 French workers who had retired found that the odds of having disturbed sleep in the seven years after retirement were 26 percent lower than in the seven years before they stopped working. Read More
WEDNESDAY, Nov. 4 (HealthDay News) — One percent of U.S. drivers — 1.9 million people — have had accidents or near-misses over the past year because they were driving while sleepy, a new survey finds.
Also, more than half of drivers surveyed admitted that they’ve driven over the last year while feeling drowsy, and 28 percent said they drive while sleepy at least once a month, according to the survey sponsored by the National Sleep Foundation. Read More
MONDAY, Nov. 2 (HealthDay News) — Restless legs syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized by a strong urge to move the legs, is much more common among some racial groups than others, a new U.S. study has found.
Researchers interviewed 190 people being seen at a primary care clinic. About 12 percent of those who were black, compared with 36 percent of those who were not black, were found to have restless legs symptoms. Overall, the prevalence of restless legs was 23 percent among the clinic participants. Read More
FRIDAY, Oct. 30 (HealthDay News) — That extra hour of sleep you’ll get in most parts of the country over the weekend might be restful, but the beginning of Daylight Saving Time could spell trouble for your body clock, a sleep expert says.
Dr. Atul Malhotra, medical director of the sleep disorders research program in the division of sleep medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, explained in a hospital news release that there are ways to prevent the time change from disrupting your sleep habits. Read More
WEDNESDAY, Oct. 28 (HealthDay News) — Letting children sleep late on weekends and holidays might help them avoid becoming overweight or obese, a new study suggests.
Researchers in Hong Kong found that children who got less sleep tended to be heavier (as measured by body mass index, or BMI) than children who slept more. But among children who slept less than eight hours a night, those who compensated for their weekday sleep deficit by sleeping late on weekends or holidays were significantly less likely to be overweight or obese. Read More
TUESDAY, Oct. 27 (HealthDay News) — New research provides the first hard evidence that the characteristic snorting and gasping of sleep apnea can spur potentially fatal heartbeat abnormalities.
Previous studies have suggested an association between sleep apnea and cardiac arrhythmias but they had not established a cause-and-effect relationship, said study senior author Dr. Susan Redline, a professor of medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Read More
THURSDAY, Oct. 1 (HealthDay News) — Older women sleep longer and better than older men, even though many women believe they have worse sleep, researchers in the Netherlands have found.
The study of 956 people, aged 59 to 79, found that women reported less and poorer sleep than men on all of the self-reported measures, including a 13.2 minute shorter total sleep time (6.79 hours versus 7.01 hours), 10.1 minute longer sleep onset latency, and a 4.2 percent lower sleep efficiency. Read More
MONDAY, Sept. 28 (HealthDay News) — People with sleep apnea who are also obese may triple the chances of eliminating their sleep problems by losing weight, a new study suggests.
Losing about 10 percent of their body weight was enough to bring on total or near-total remission, said Gary Foster, head of the Center for Obesity Research and Education at Temple University in Philadelphia, and lead author of the study.
“It’s been clear that obesity increases the risk of sleep apnea but less clear that if obese people or people with type 2 diabetes lost weight, it would result in significant improvements in their sleep apnea — and it did,” said Foster. Read More
THURSDAY, Sept. 24 (HealthDay News) — If you’re middle-aged, you might want to try a little harder to get a good night’s sleep, now that new research suggests the right amount of slumber might keep Alzheimer’s disease at bay.
The research was conducted in mice and is preliminary, and it may not apply to humans. Still, the possible link between sleep deprivation and Alzheimer’s raises the prospect of possible treatments that target related pathways in the brain, explained study author Dr. David M. Holtzman, chairman of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Read More
TUESDAY, Aug. 18 (HealthDay News) — The classic manifestations of sleep apnea — loud snoring, interrupted breathing and sleep disruption — nearly double the risk for chronic disease and premature death among middle-aged and elderly men, according to major new research.
Even patients with moderate sleep apnea face an increased death risk, as much as 17 percent, compared with those who do not have sleep-disordered breathing problems, the decade-long U.S. study finds. Read More
