sleep

Health Of The Nation: Obesity Up, But ‘Notable’ Decline In Physical Inactivity

In our house, when there’s good news and bad news, we usually start with the good. So here goes:

According to a new national health statistics report out today analyzing five key health behaviors among U.S. adults — sufficient sleep, smoking, drinking, obesity, and physical activity — there are several bright spots. For instance, the survey found that fewer young people (18-24) are smoking and the number of adults who report they’re completely aerobically inactive showed ‘notable’ declines in recent years, from 39.7% inactive between 2005-2007 to 33.9% in the years 2008-2010.

O.K., now the bad news: Heavy drinking has increased, except among the senior set over 75, smoking prevalence remains virtually unchanged (beyond the youngsters) and obesity is up.

girlsrunning

My first reaction is: Huh? Is anyone out there listening to Michelle Obama and all those other Get-Out-There-And-Move and Cut-The-Sugar advocates?

But then I talked to Dr. Eddie Phillips, director of the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine and an assistant professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School, who insisted on highlighting the positive.

A little background: Dr. Phillips’ focus is on physical activity, the link between health and exercise and on educating physicians about how to more seamlessly incorporate physical activity into the practice of medicine.

His takeaway from the CDC report is this: “People are starting to move.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, alcohol, exercise, obesity, public health, sleep, smoking

April 11, 2013 | 10:34 AM | Rachel Zimmerman

Childhood Obesity Magic Bullet? More Sleep

As parents and policy makers agonize over how to combat childhood obesity, a report in the journal Pediatrics last week suggests at least one quick, simple fix: more sleep.
sleeping teen

The study, which involved surveying more than 1,400 adolescents from suburban Phladelphia high schools, found that each additional hour of sleep was associated with a decrease in Body Mass Index (BMI). And, the association between more sleep and lower BMI was most pronounced in the “upper tail” of the BMI disribution, the study found.

The report concludes: “Increasing sleep among adolescents, especially those in the upper half of the BMI distribution, may help prevent overweight and obesity.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, children's health, obesity, sleep

March 5, 2013 | 8:05 AM | Rachel Zimmerman

Why To Exercise Today: So You Can Sleep Tonight

It’s something that everyone who has suffered from insomnia or been summoned hourly by the hungry cries of a newborn baby knows: sleep is critical for sanity, physical health and proper brain functioning. Without it, you’re sunk.

And here’s a pretty easy way to get it: just go out (or stay in) and exercise — now.

RelaxingMusic/flickr

The National Sleep Foundation’s 2013 Sleep in America Poll found “a compelling” link between exercise and better sleep — and folks didn’t have to work out much to reap the benefits.

According to the poll of 1,000 adults between 23 and 60 years old:

Self-described exercisers report better sleep than self-described non-exercisers even though they say they sleep the same amount each night (6 hours and 51 minutes, average on weeknights). Vigorous, moderate and light exercisers are significantly more likely to say “I had a good night’s sleep” every night or almost every night on work nights than non-exercisers (67%-56% vs. 39%). Also, more than three-fourths of exercisers (76%-83%) say their sleep quality was very good or fairly good in the past two weeks, compared to slightly more than one-half of non-exercisers (56%).

Of course, self-reporting is always tricky, and it is possible that the good sleepers just felt more compelled to exercise, rather than the other way around, but still, the link between exercise and better quality sleep just makes intuitive sense (for what that’s worth).

Among poll respondents, more intense exercise tended to be better and those who didn’t exercise at all seemed to suffer most from sleep problems. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Personal Health, sleep, why to exercise today

January 29, 2013 | 10:04 AM | Carey Goldberg

More Reason To Sleep On It: Sorting Out The Brain’s ‘Inbox’

sleepingkid

Imagine you’re cleaning off your desk. You sort some papers into folders with the relevant labels. Others you red-tag as “urgent” or yellow-tag as “semi-urgent.” Quite a few go directly into the large circular file at your feet, also known as the trash basket.

Turns out, it seems that your brain does something very similar with your memories every night as you sleep.

The journal Nature Neuroscience has just published a special issue on memory, and among its authors is Dr. Robert Stickgold of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, a leading researcher on the role that sleep plays in consolidating memories.

In the past, my layperson’s take-home message from his complex research might have been, “Sleep helps strengthen memories. So if it’s the night before an exam and you have the option of cramming more or sleeping, better to sleep.”

But there’s ever so much more to know, and for researchers to find out — about sleep states beyond REM, about how our brains “tag” some memories for retention and dump others, about how sleep can improve performance overnight — even about why toddlers so desperately need naps.

Our conversation, lightly edited:

You’ve written a sweeping review of years of recent research on what sleep does to memories. How would you sum up for a lay audience what we now know?

I’d start by telling them a true story, which is that about 50 years ago, my father commented to me that when he was in law school studying for an exam, he would stay up late at night reading case after case, and go to sleep with a complete mishmash of cases in his mind. When he woke up the next morning, they had just all been filed away in the right spot. That was 50 years ago, and I can now say, ‘Yes, and now we have an idea how.’

It really does happen while you sleep, and although some of it can happen while you’re awake, especially if you’re consciously working at it, sleep seems to be a time that’s been set aside to make sure that filing gets done, even without your awareness or intent.

So sleep is a time of sorting and discarding memories?

Sleep is doing about five things. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, Science, memory, sleep

October 25, 2012 | 12:06 PM | Carey Goldberg

Why To Exercise Today From Oprah’s Trainer: Nurture Yourself Every Day

Trainer and author Bob Greene

Bob Greene, famed as Oprah Winfrey’s personal trainer, has a new book out, “20 Years Younger,” and will be sharing tips from it — and a few free copies — this evening from 7 to 9 at the Natick mall’s first floor atrium.

The Empire of Oprah can sometimes venture into some, shall we say, non-peer-reviewed advice? But his prescriptions have always tended to strike me as sensible and backed by reasonable evidence. Before we get into “20 Years Younger,” I asked him to formulate today’s “Why To Exercise.” His response:

Successful people look at today and find ways, even if their life is falling apart, to be happy today and feel good today and treat themselves right. And exercise and eating right is nurturing yourself every day. Whether or not the world is doing that, or close friends and family are doing that, you have the opportunity every day to nurture yourself, which is the most important thing to do because it also affects others.

Now for the book. Our conversation, lightly edited:

Funny coincidence about the title of your new book, “20 Years Younger.” I was just talking to a friend who recently returned from a high school reunion of 50-year-olds, and she said it looked sort of like two separate reunions, one of 40-year-olds and one of 60-year-olds. What would you say is the lesson there?
Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, fitness, oprah, sleep, why to exercise today

July 3, 2012 | 9:38 AM | Rachel Zimmerman

Older People Fall Asleep Easily — They Just Can’t Stay There, Study Finds

Another indignity of aging: loss of continuous sleep. (Fairy Heart/flickr)

Sleep, for me, is the key to overall health.
With it, I’ll gleefully dance with my kids to Adele.
Without it, I’m a raging shrew.

So I’m interested in all research that holds the promise of helping me get a good night’s sleep; the prospect of which grows dimmer with each passing year. I can fall into slumber like a rock, but then every tiny sound — a snore, a neighborhood cat, a child’s sigh — awakens me fully. Drugs sometimes help — sometimes not.

New research led by sleep specialist Elizabeth B. Klerman, MD, PhD, an associate physician in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, reflects my own experience and one common to many other aging adults (though I’m not as old as the older folks Klerman studied, who were between 60 and 76, but otherwise healthy and not taking sleep medications).

Klerman and her Brigham colleagues found that this older group was able to fall asleep just as easily as a younger study cohort that ranged in age from 21-30. But the older folks had far more trouble remaining asleep through the night. Indeed, said Klerman, who is also an associate professor at Harvard Medical School: “The older population was four times more likely to wake up throughout the night when compared to younger people.”

The sleep researchers figured this out using a statistical model known as “survival analysis” and applying it to existing sleep data; they compared changes in the so-called “hazard” of awakening and falling back to sleep in the different age groups. Evidently, sleep “survival” in the older group was far worse, according to this type of novel analysis, hence all those nighttime awakenings. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, aging, research, sleep

April 17, 2012 | 8:48 AM | Rachel Zimmerman

Study: Depressed Moms Wake Sleeping Babies Unnecessarily

Worry begets worry (and sleepless infants), a new study finds. (littlemaiba/flickr)

File this under: Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes.

A new government-funded study found that depressed, worried mothers were more likely to wake up their sleeping babies (and wake them unnecessarily) than non-depressed moms. This, in violation of perhaps the most important rule of mothering: Don’t, under any circumstances, wake a sleeping baby.

This study makes me sad because this was me: The overwrought new mom hovering over the totally fine baby to the point she woke up, confirming my worst fears (that I had a baby who wouldn’t sleep) and keeping me in a constant state of sleep deprivation (and depression) until she was about 5. But I did learn, and I’m pretty sure I let go a bit with my second daughter, leaving us both in peace at night.

Here’s the news release from Penn State:

“We found that mothers with high depressive symptom levels are more likely to excessively worry about their infants at night than mothers with low symptom levels, and that such mothers were more likely to seek out their babies at night and spend more time with their infants than mothers with low symptom levels,” said Douglas M. Teti, associate director of the Social Science Research Institute and professor of human development, psychology and pediatrics. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Personal Health, anxiety, infants, mothering, sleep

February 13, 2012 | 1:10 PM | Carey Goldberg

How Much Sleep Should Kids Get? Two New Clues

Let’s try to put these two puzzle pieces together:

• A new study out of Brigham Young University finds that toward the end of high school, students score best on tests if they get about seven hours of sleep the night before, not the nine hours recommended by federal guidelines.

• And in today’s edition of the journal Pediatrics, a historical look at sleep guidelines finds that they’ve always recommended about 40 minutes more than children were actually getting, even as the average length of children’s sleep has grown shorter.

What are we to conclude? Perhaps that some of the science on sleep remains very iffy?

‘The key is whether the child wakes up refreshed in the morning.’

A USA Today story on the Pediatrics study — headlined “No science, just expert guesses on how much sleep kids need” — quotes the study’s co-author, Lisa Ane Matricciani: When it comes to prescribing sleep, most recommendations “are guesses, generally based on loose observations and opinions.”

But it also notes that:

Insufficient sleep is a public health concern, known to be associated with injury, chronic health conditions and death. Among children, it has been associated with lower academic performance and more obesity, injuries and accidents, says sleep specialist Rafael Pelayo, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Stanford University Medical School. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, pediatrics, sleep

November 17, 2010 | 10:14 AM | Carey Goldberg

It’s Official: Working Moms Do Far More Wake-Up Duty Than Dads

Sometimes I get peeved when I see my tax money funding federal research that tells us things we already know. But once in a while, it gives me great gratification to see the imprimatur of official science stamped onto a well-known phenomenon. Such as, for example, that even when mothers work outside the home, they tend to be the ones who get up when the baby cries or the toddler demands comfort in the middle of the night. And that therefore, they tend to get extra-exhausted just as life is asking the most of them.

Here’s the report from the University of Michigan, on a federally funded study soon to appear in the journal Social Forces:

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Working mothers are two-and-a-half times as likely as working fathers to interrupt their sleep to take care of others.

That is the finding of a University of Michigan study providing the first known nationally representative data documenting substantial gender differences in getting up at night, mainly with babies and small children.

And women are not only more likely to get up at night to care for others, their sleep interruptions last longer—an average of 44 minutes for women, compared to about 30 minutes for men.

“Interrupted sleep is a burden borne disproportionately by women,” said sociologist Sarah Burgard, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). “And this burden may not only affect the health and well-being of women, but also contribute to continuing gender inequality in earnings and career advancement.”

Let me translate: It’s awfully hard to get ahead when you can barely drag yourself through the day. Continue reading →