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Short sleep duration is causally associated with an increased risk for rheumatoid arthritis (RA), according to a study.. Rui-Chen Gao and colleagues examined whether sleep disorders are causally associated with RA. Seven sleep-related traits were selected: short sleep duration, frequent insomnia, any insomnia, sleep duration, getting up, morningness (early-to-bed/up habit), and snoring and 27, 53, 57, 57, 70, 274, and 42 individual single-nucleotide polymorphisms were obtained for these traits as instrumental variables. Outcome variables were obtained from a public genome-wide association study, including 14,361 cases and 43,923 controls of European ancestry. A two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis using inverse variance...

Melissa Bond was caring for two infant children — a newborn, and a year-old toddler with Down syndrome. It was 2009, and she had recently lost her magazine job. Her marriage was disintegrating, and she spent night after night pacing her house in Salt Lake City, watching the hours tick by. When a physician gave her a prescription for Ativan — a “strong, fast-acting sedative hypnotic” that he guaranteed would help her get some shut-eye — she accepted it, no questions asked. “I was in such a state of desperation that I didn’t research the drugs,” Bond, now 53, told...

Surface warfare reforms crafted to improve mariner skills and manage demand for ships are trickling into the fleet five years after two fatal collisions in the Western Pacific forced the Navy to retool how the service trains the surface fleet.Multiple investigations and criminal prosecutions found that basic failures in seamanship and ship handling led to the June 17, 2017, early morning collision between USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) and ACX Crystal off the coast of Japan. Seven sailors died.Two months later, a misunderstanding of a newly installed throttle control system led to USS John McCain (DDG-56) drifting out of a ship separation...

You might think that having the whole bed to yourself would leave you feeling more refreshed in the morning than sleeping with someone who might toss, turn or snore. Yet, a new study suggests that adults who share their beds with a partner have less severe insomnia, less fatigue and more sleep time. They also report being more satisfied with their lives and relationships, as well as having lower levels of stress, depression and anxiety. "Even though you're sleeping next to someone who may snore and roll around, it did something that was just beneficial," said Michael Grandner, director of...

Everyone knows the horrible feeling: A stuffy night, just a little too warm, leads to restless sleep, and then next morning, you feel like a slow, groggy shell of yourself. That feeling isn’t just unpleasant. Years of research show that sleep deprivation can ramp up heart disease risk, intensify mood disorders, slow one’s ability to learn, and much more—problems with big personal, societal, and economic costs. Now a new study links sleep loss—and by extension, all the problems that come with it—with climate change. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen found that ever-warmer nighttime temperatures, nudged higher by climate change,...

In a small study of healthy adults aged 55 and older, 5 mg of melatonin increased total sleep time compared to a placebo. Researchers conducted the study in 24 healthy, older adults to evaluate whether a high-dose or a low-dose melatonin supplement could improve sleep. The team found that the higher dose had a significant impact, increasing total sleep time compared to placebo by more than 15 minutes for nighttime sleep and by half an hour for daytime sleep. The body naturally produces melatonin, which helps regulate a person's sleep-wake cycle with night and day. Melatonin levels peak at night....

Soon after entering the US, two-year-old Jocelyn and her parents laid down on the streets of Del Rio, Texas and slept. The Post witnessed three immigrant children bunking down outdoors Thursday, including Jocelyn — a taste of what aid groups fear will be a massive humanitarian crisis once the Biden administration lifts the Title 42 health authority, which allowed summary expulsions of migrants, on May 23.

Some people are gifted with genes that pack the benefits of slumber into an efficient time window, keeping them peppy on only four or six hours of sleep a night, according to researchers at UC San Francisco. In addition, the scientists said, these “elite sleepers” show psychological resilience and resistance to neurodegenerative conditions that may point the way to fending off neurological disease. “There’s a dogma in the field that everyone needs eight hours of sleep, but our work to date confirms that the amount of sleep people need differs based on genetics,” said neurologist Louis Ptacek, MD, one of...

A new study on how getting sufficient sleep affects caloric intake in a real-world setting could change how we think about weight loss. Overall, individuals who increased their sleep duration were able to reduce their caloric intake by an average of 270 kcal per day—which would translate to roughly 12 kg, or 26 lbs., of weight loss over three years if the effects were maintained over a long term. "We saw that after just a single sleep counseling session, participants could change their bedtime habits enough to lead to an increase in sleep duration," said Tasali. "We simply coached each...

Individual aspects of poor sleep can be detrimental to heart health. But if you combine them, the risk of heart disease can increase by as much as 141 percent. Researchers focused on multiple aspects of sleep health, such as regularity, satisfaction, alertness during waking hours, timing of sleep, sleep efficiency and sleep duration and linked them to physician-diagnosed heart disease. They found that each additional increase in self-reported sleep health problems was associated with a 54 percent increased risk of heart disease. The estimated risk of heart disease associated with an increase in sleep health problems was much higher for...

The painter described falling into the briefest of slumbers to refresh his mind. Now scientists have shown the method effective at inducing creativity. [Full Transcript] Christopher Intagliata: Salvador Dali had a peculiar way of refreshing his mind—something he called "slumber with a key." In his 1948 book "50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship," he described how it worked.

Asthma sufferers generally find their condition gets worse at night. Now, a research group may understand why. Melatonin, a sleep hormone that is sometimes prescribed to treat insomnia, exasperates the constriction of the bronchus—the pathway that moves air to and from the lungs. Patients with asthma often experience a worsening of asthmatic symptoms at night in so-called "nocturnal asthma." According to reports, more than 50 percent of asthma deaths occur at night, exposing a link between nocturnal asthma symptoms and asthma deaths. Although some have proposed several triggers that explain the pathogenesis of nocturnal asthma, the precise mechanisms regulating this...

In humans, aging is often associated with changes in sleeping patterns, cognitive abilities and functional network connectivity (i.e., the strength with which activity in different brain regions correlates over time). While many neuroscientists investigated these changes over the past decades, the relationship between them is still poorly understood. Researchers have recently carried out a study exploring the possible effects of sleep on the relationship between functional network connectivity (FNC) and cognitive function in the elderly. Their paper shows that, in older adults, sleep quality could modulate the association between FNC and cognitive function. "Previous studies have showed that resting-state brain...

New research from RCSI has demonstrated the significant role that an irregular body clock plays in driving inflammation in the body's immune cells, with implications for the most serious and prevalent diseases in humans. The circadian body clock generates 24-hour rhythms that keep humans healthy and in time with the day/night cycle. This includes regulating the rhythm of the body's own (innate) immune cells called macrophages. When these cell rhythms are disrupted (due to things like erratic eating/sleeping patterns or shift work), the cells produce molecules which drive inflammation. This can lead to chronic inflammatory diseases such as heart disease,...

Multiple studies in humans and mouse models indicate that sleep disruptions raise the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) by increasing the accumulation of disease-relevant proteins such as amyloid-beta (A-beta) in the brain. In the current study, a team discovered that restoring normal sleep by returning to normal the activity of the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN), a brain region involved in maintaining stable sleep, reduced the accumulation of A-beta plaques in the brain. The study suggests that TRN not only may play a previously unsuspected driving role in symptoms associated with Alzheimer's, but also that restoring its normal activity could be...

President Joe Biden marked a belated labor day at the White House Wednesday by speaking about how intimately he knew unions. 'By the way, of course, I sleep with a NEA member every night,' Biden told a crowd gathered in the East Room. 'Same one. same one,' he added as attendees applauded. As a teacher, first lady Jill Biden belongs to the National Education Association labor union. 'Jill had her first day of full time teaching yesterday - this year, back to school,' Biden also added.

A new study published in the journal JAMA Neurology suggests that the length of sleep time by adults could play a major role in their brain health, including the prevention of early on-set dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.It is well-proven among sleep scientists that poor sleep quality is common among older adults and can lead to changes in cognitive function, including a person’s ability to properly think, reason, problem-solve, make decisions, memory and attention span.Researchers used this basis as the jumping-off point for their own study to investigate any association between sleep duration, demographic, lifestyle choices, cognitive function and levels of...

-Obstructive sleep apnea has become a worldwide health concern. -Sleep apnea has associations with an increased risk of sudden and cardiovascular-related deaths. -Future research should focus on decreasing and preventing this serious sleep condition. Obstructive sleep apnea has become a globally prevalent health concern. Recent literature estimates that more than 1 billion individuals experience this chronic sleep disorder. A study by Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, which appears in BMJ Open Respiratory Research, found that those who receive a diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea are at a significantly greater risk of dying suddenly than those who do not...

A woman in Pinellas County, Florida, was arrested late Sunday after she allegedly punched her girlfriend in the face for "talking in her sleep about an ex," documents showed. Officers responded around 10:39 p.m. to a neighbor's report of a fight happening at a residence in the city of Dunedin and encountered the alleged 21-year-old victim, The Smoking Gun reported, citing an arrest affidavit. According to the police report, the unnamed woman said she was asleep at the apartment she shares with her 23-year-old girlfriend Alexis Talley when the latter woke her up because she allegedly started "talking in her...

It was as close to a sleepless night as it gets outside of Seattle. So all I’ve got are these covert photos of an assassin plying his trade in the dead of night:Is it any reason we’re losing the war? The enemy has infiltrated our inner defense system and exposed our white fragility.*Alternate Title: “Ah Cain’t Breathe!”Quick Raj update: the surgery team has determined him to be fit for his second knee replacement and it is scheduled for June 9th, assuming his own Doc concurs following his appointment next Wednesday. I still have some underlying concerns but at this point...