Wildfires: How to cope when smoke affects air quality and health
What can magnesium do for you and how much do you need?
Dry socket: Preventing and treating a painful condition that can occur after tooth extraction
What happens during sleep 鈥� and how to improve it
How is metastatic prostate cancer detected and treated in men over 70?
Could biofeedback help your migraines?
What is autism spectrum disorder?
Plantar warts: Options for treating this common foot condition
Cancer survivorship: What comes next after treatment
Nutritional yeast: Does this savory, vegan seasoning pack a nutritional punch?
Sleep Archive
Articles
Sleeping in on the weekend won't help you recover from lost sleep
Research we're watching
Many people skimp on sleep during the week and try to make up for lost time on the weekend. But a study published February 28 in Current Biology shows this strategy won't necessarily reverse the ill effects of sleep deprivation on your body.
The study, conducted in a sleep lab, tested the health effects of three sleep strategies over a two-week period. Participants in one group were allowed to sleep up to nine hours a night. Those in a second group were limited to five hours a night. People in the third group slept five hours nightly during the week, but were allowed to sleep in on Saturday and Sunday.
Four keys to prevent cardiovascular disease
Are you doing everything you can to keep your heart healthy?
After decades of steady decline, the number of deaths from cardiovascular disease (CVD) has risen over the past few years, according to the American Heart Association.
The good news is that an estimated 80% of all CVD cases 鈥� heart disease, heart attack, heart failure, and stroke 鈥� can be prevented. The key is to control high blood pressure and high cholesterol and to maintain healthy habits, such as exercising regularly, eating a plant-based diet, getting enough sleep, and not smoking.
Poor sleep can change your reaction to pain
In the journals
Lack of sleep may make you more sensitive to pain, according to a study in the Jan. 28, 2019, issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.
Researchers found that poor sleep interferes with certain pain centers of the brain and can change how a person perceives and reacts to discomfort. In the study, scientists scanned the brains of 25 healthy adults in two sleep environments: first, after they slept eight hours, and again after they were kept awake for 24 to 28 hours. During both scans, they also received uncomfortable levels of heat to their legs.
How a good night's sleep might help your heart
Research we're watching
Sleep has long been known to help protect you against heart disease, and researchers now think they know at least one reason why. A study published online February 13 by the journal Nature looked at how sleep duration and quality relates to the buildup of damaging plaque in the arteries.
Harvard Medical School researchers found that a lack of good sleep boosts the body's production of inflammatory white blood cells that earlier research has linked to fatty buildup in the arteries. This could help explain why sleep problems can lead to arterial buildup. Poor sleep is linked not only to clogged arteries, but also to a host of chronic health conditions, such as cancer, obesity, and diabetes 鈥� all good reasons to make sure you get your z's.
Answers to the top questions about cannabis extract
Sales of cannabidiol-infused products are expected to top $2 billion by 2021. But is CBD right for you?
Cannabidiol (CBD) is touted as a natural wonder that can help treat symptoms of everything from anxiety to arthritis pain. The plant extract comes from two varieties of cannabis 鈥� hemp and marijuana 鈥� and is available in creams, tinctures, oils, patches, gummy bears, capsules, and more. You can even add CBD to a latte if you walk into a coffee shop in some cities.
But is CBD safe for older adults? There haven't been a lot of large studies of CBD's safety, but more traditional medicines for pain and anxiety are not free of adverse effects, either. "I think CBD is likely safer than many other treatments people use for pain, insomnia, or anxiety," says Dr. Peter Grinspoon, a primary care physician with Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. Other physicians don't think we know enough about the safety profile of CBD to be sure.
Sleep shortfall linked to higher risk of clogged arteries
Research we're watching
Too little sleep may be hard on your blood vessels, according to a study in the January issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
For the study, 3,974 healthy, middle-aged people wore watchlike devices called actigraphs for a week to track how long they slept and how often they woke up and moved during the night. The participants also received three-dimensional ultrasounds of arteries in their necks and upper legs and special scans to check their heart arteries.
Poor sleep linked to arterial buildup
Research we're watching
An ongoing lack of sleep may lead to more fatty buildup in the arteries, according to a study in the January issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Researchers measured the sleep quality of 3,974 people with no history of heart disease.
Participants wore a sleep monitor for seven days and were then categorized based how much they slept: short sleep (six to seven hours a night), reference sleep (seven to eight hours a night) and long sleep (more than eight hours a night). Study authors also looked at how fragmented participants' sleep was throughout the nights. They then compared those findings to measures of arterial buildup in the heart and other parts of the body.
Time-sensitive clues about cardiovascular risk
Why do heart attack rates rise on Monday mornings and the week after daylight savings time begins?
Deep inside your brain is a small cluster of cells that serves as your body's master clock. These cells govern your circadian rhythm, the 24-hour internal clock that keeps your body in sync with the day-night cycle. But nearly all your cells also have their own clocks to ensure that each one performs its unique role 鈥� such as producing proteins or releasing hormones 鈥� at the right time.
These biological timekeepers are under genetic control. But what happens if our behavior or environment is out of sync with our internal clocks? Understanding the potential health consequences of that misalignment is the focus of the Medical Chronobiology Program at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital, says Dr. Frank Scheer, who directs the program.
Study: Light pollution may trigger insomnia
Research we're watching
High exposure to bright, artificial outdoor lights during the night may result in sleepless nights for older adults. The more of this so-called light pollution that people were exposed to at night, the more they seemed to turn to medication to help them sleep, according to a study published in the Nov. 15, 2018, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. People in brightly lit areas, as judged by satellite data, also seemed to take those drugs for longer and took higher doses than people who weren't exposed to nighttime light.
To come to their conclusions, the researchers looked at data on more than 50,000 adults ages 60 or older from the National Health Insurance Service鈥揘ational Sample Cohort, a database of information collected on people who participated in health screenings between 2002 and 2013 in South Korea. Researchers compared the people's nighttime light exposure and their use of two sleep drugs, zolpidem (Ambien) and triazolam (Halcion).
Wildfires: How to cope when smoke affects air quality and health
What can magnesium do for you and how much do you need?
Dry socket: Preventing and treating a painful condition that can occur after tooth extraction
What happens during sleep 鈥� and how to improve it
How is metastatic prostate cancer detected and treated in men over 70?
Could biofeedback help your migraines?
What is autism spectrum disorder?
Plantar warts: Options for treating this common foot condition
Cancer survivorship: What comes next after treatment
Nutritional yeast: Does this savory, vegan seasoning pack a nutritional punch?
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