Wellness and Sleep: ParuchMD

BACKGROUND: Physical activity level is an important tool to identify individuals predisposed to developing chronic diseases, which represent a major concern worldwide. OBJECTIVE: To identify correlates of daily step counts measured using pedometers, as well as analyze the associations between health outcomes and 3 different amounts of daily physical activity. METHODS: The sample comprised 278 participants (126 men and 153 women) with a mean age of 46...

Sleep is a vital segment of life, however, the mechanisms of diet promoting sleep are unclear and are the focus of research. Insomnia is a general sleep disorder and functional foods are known to play a key role in the prevention of insomnia. A number of studies have demonstrated that major insomnia risk factors in human being are less functional foods in dietary. There are higher functional components in functional foods promoting sleep, including tryptophan, GABA, calcium, potassium, melatonin, pyridoxine, L-ornithine and hexadecanoic acid; but wake-promoting neurochemical factors include serotonin, noradrenalin, acetylcholine, histamine, orexin and so on...

Sleep has numerous important physiological and cognitive functions that may be particularly important to elite athletes. Recent evidence, as well as anecdotal information, suggests that athletes may experience a reduced quality and/or quantity of sleep. Sleep deprivation can have significant effects on athletic performance, especially submaximal, prolonged exercise. Compromised sleep may also influence learning, memory, cognition, pain perception, immunity and inflammation. Furthermore, changes in glucose metabolism and neuroendocrine function as a result of chronic, partial sleep deprivation may result in alterations in carbohydrate metabolism, appetite, food intake and protein synthesis...

Short sleep duration is increasingly recognized as a risk factor for obesity. Sleep is now considered 1 of the 3 lifestyle behaviors, along with diet and exercise, which are closely associated with health. If sleep duration is a causal factor in the etiology of obesity, it must affect energy intake and/or energy expenditure to create a positive energy balance. The preponderance of evidence to date points to an effect of sleep restriction on energy intake that exceeds the added energy costs of maintaining longer wakefulness...

BACKGROUND: The increased risk of obesity among short sleepers is most likely explained by increased energy intake. However, food intake could not only be altered quantitavely but also qualitatively. Therefore, we performed a correlational analysis on self-reported food intake and sleep in 51 students from Maastricht and surroundings. RESULTS: Students that slept longer had a lower caloric intake: ρ = -0.378, p = 0.006, the amount of calories consumed per minute awake remaining relatively stable...

Historically, perhaps no daytime behavior has been more closely associated with better sleep than exercise. The assumption that exercise promotes sleep has also been central to various hypotheses about the functions of sleep. Hypotheses that sleep serves an energy conservation function, a body tissue restitution function, or a temperature down-regulation function all have predicted a uniquely potent effect of exercise on sleep because no other stimulus elicits greater depletion of energy stores, tissue breakdown, or elevation of body temperature, respectively...

In the United States every year the total costs of giving sleeping pills can be estimated at $500 million to $1 billion. Many if not most of the prescriptions are inappropriate. Sleeping pill use, associated with a 50% increase in overall mortality, is especially dangerous for older people, who have a high risk of sleep apnea. There is virtually no evidence that sleeping pills are effective with prolonged usage and no evidence for life-preserving benefits. Excessive use of sleeping pills should be discouraged with a tax of 4 per pill...

BACKGROUND: Patients often complain about insufficient sleep or chronic insomnia in the belief that they need 8 hours of sleep. Treatment strategies may be guided by what sleep durations predict optimal survival and whether insomnia might signal mortality risks. METHODS: In 1982, the Cancer Prevention Study II of the American Cancer Society asked participants about their sleep duration and frequency of insomnia. Cox proportional hazards survival models were computed to determine whether sleep duration or frequency of insomnia was associated with excess mortality up to 1988, controlling simultaneously for demographics, habits, health factors, and use of various medications...

Prospective epidemiologic data of the American Cancer Society disclosed that reported usual sleep durations among groups who complained of insomnia and sleeping pill use "often" overlapped with those of groups who had no complaints. Reports of insomnia were not consistently associated with increased mortality when several factors were controlled; however, men who reported usually sleeping less than four hours were 2.80 times as likely to have died within six years as men who reported 7.0 to 7.9 hours of sleep...

This study sought to characterize the impact of sleep location (own sleeping environment vs. partner's sleeping environment), social setting (sleeping in pairs vs. sleeping alone), and sex on sleep. An experimental 2 x 2 (sleep location x social setting) within-subject design was employed with 15 young heterosexual couples. The results suggest that sleep location does not appear to have a strong and consistent effect on sleep quantity or quality. The social setting had a specific effect in heterosexual young men, who were found to sleep longer and rise later when cosleeping with their partner...

OBJECTIVE: Using population-based data, we document the comorbidities (medical, neurologic, and psychiatric) and consequences for daily functioning of excessive quantity of sleep (EQS), defined as a main sleep period or 24-hour sleep duration ≥ 9 hours accompanied by complaints of impaired functioning or distress due to excessive sleep, and its links to excessive sleepiness. METHODS: A cross-sectional telephone study using a representative sample of 19,136 noninstitutionalized individuals living in the United States, aged ≥ 18 years (participation rate = 83...