Paul L. Dunham, Ph.D. and his team at Missouri State University’s Center for Biomedical & Life Sciences sought to understand the mechanisms by which sleep disturbance increases the risk of migraine and may even trigger migraine.

“Previous clinical data support a relationship between sleep quality and migraine,” said Dr. Durham, “so we used an established model of sleep deprivation to measure levels of proteins that lower the activation threshold of peripheral and central nerves involved in pain transmission during migraine. We found that REM sleep deprivation caused increased expression of the proteins p38, PKA, and P2X3, which are known to play an important role in initiating and sustaining chronic pain.”

“So little is known about the biological mechanisms that underlie how certain factors trigger a migraine attack,” said David Dodick, M.D., president of the AHS. “This is important work and this Missouri State team should be applauded for beginning to shed light on an area desperately in need of investigation.”

The work was supported by Merck & Co.

More than 200 scientific papers and posters are being presented during the AHS meeting which is expected to draw some 500 migraine and headache health professionals including doctors, researchers, and specialists.

Source: Lauren Martiello, American Headache Society

“Sleep duration has shortened considerably in western societies in the past decade and simultaneously, there has been an increase in the prevalence of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes,” said Esther Donga, MD of the Leiden University Medical Center in The Netherlands and lead author of the study. “The co-occurring rises in shortened sleep and diabetes prevalence may not be a coincidence. Our findings show a short night of sleep has more profound effects on metabolic regulation than previously appreciated.”

Previous studies have found that reductions in sleep duration over multiple nights result in impaired glucose tolerance, but this is the first study to examine the effects of only a single night of partial sleep restriction on insulin sensitivity.

In this study, researchers examined nine healthy subjects, once after a night of normal sleep duration (approximately eight hours), and once after a night of four hours of sleep. Insulin sensitivity of each study participant was measured using the hyperinsulinemic euglycemic clamp method. This method uses catheters to infuse glucose and insulin into the bloodstream and then determines insulin sensitivity by measuring the amount of glucose necessary to compensate for an increased insulin level without causing hypoglycemia.

“Our data indicate that insulin sensitivity is not fixed in healthy subjects, but depends on the duration of sleep in the preceding night,” said Donga. “In fact it is tempting to speculate that the negative effects of multiple nights of shortened sleep on glucose tolerance can be reproduced, at least in part, by just one sleepless night.”

Donga adds that further studies are needed to evaluate whether interventions aimed at improving sleep duration may be beneficial in stabilizing glucose levels in patients with diabetes.

Source: Aaron Lohr, The Endocrine Society, via EurekAlert

Recent studies have shown that behaviors such as happiness, obesity, smoking and altruism are “contagious” within adult social networks. In other words, your behavior not only influences your friends, but also their friends and so on. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and Harvard University have taken this a step farther and found that the spread of one behavior in social networks – in this case, poor sleep patterns – influences the spread of another behavior, adolescent drug use.

The study, led by Sara C. Mednick, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the VA San Diego Healthcare System, will be published March 19 in PLoS One.

“This is our first investigation of the spread of illegal drug use in social networks,” said Mednick. “We believe it is also the first study in any age population on the spread of sleep behaviors through social networks.”

Using social network data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, Mednick and her colleagues James H. Fowler, UCSD Department of Political Science and Nicholas A. Christakis, Harvard Medical School, mapped the social networks of 8,349 adolescents in grades 7 through 12. They found clusters of poor sleep behavior and marijuana use that extended up to four degrees of separation (to one’s friends’ friends’ friends’ friends) in the social network.

Another novel network effect that they discovered was that teens who are at the center of the network are at greater risk of poor sleep, which in turn means they are more likely to use marijuana – putting them at the crossroads of two behaviors increases a teenager’s vulnerability.

Contrary to the general assumption that drug use has a negative effect on sleep, the researchers also found that sleep loss is likely to drive adolescents to use drugs – the less they sleep the more likely their friends are to sleep poorly and use marijuana.

“Our behaviors are connected to each other and we need to start thinking about how one behavior affects our lives on many levels,” said Mednick. “Therefore, when parents, schools and law enforcement want to look for ways to influence one outcome, such as drug use, our research suggests that targeting another behavior, like sleep, may have a positive influence. They should be promoting healthy sleep habits that eliminate behaviors which interfere with sleep: take the TV out of the child’s bedroom, limit computer and phone usage to daytime and early evening hours, and promote napping.”

Source: Kim Edwards, University of California – San Diego via EurekAlert

On average, people go to work or school on the first Monday of Daylight Savings after sleeping 40 fewer minutes than normal. And recent studies have found there’s a higher risk of heart attacks, traffic accidents and workplace injuries on the first Monday of Daylight Savings.

“Many people already are chronically sleep-deprived, and Daylight Savings Time can make them even more tired for a few days,” said Dr. Nidhi Undevia, medical director of the Sleep Program at Loyola University Health System.

Undevia offers these tips for getting enough sleep after moving the clock forward an hour:

• In the days before the time change, go to bed and wake up 10 or 15 minutes earlier each day.
• Don’t nap on the Saturday before the time change.
• To help reset your internal body clock, expose yourself to sunlight in the morning as early as you can.

Loyola offers a comprehensive and multidisciplinary program to help identify and treat sleep disorders. The sleep laboratory and sleep clinic diagnose and treat a full range of sleep disorders, including insomnia, sleep walking, obstructive sleep apnea, narcolepsy, circadian rhythm disorders, restless legs syndrome and periodic limb movement disorders.

Source: Loyola University Health System

Research suggests, though, that lack of sleep can lead to memory problems, depression, cardiovascular concerns, cancer and increased risk of accidents.

“In the last couple of years, I’ve seen more overworked patients taking on extra shifts or second jobs,” Dr. Raman Malhotra, an assistant professor of neurology and director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Saint Louis University, said in a university news release. “For someone who is suffering from work-related sleep issues, changing jobs isn’t always an option. Instead, we’ve got to offer solutions to make the best of the current situation.”

Malhotra offered some suggestions for people who have sleep problems because of irregular work schedules.

For instance, if you work the night shift and sleep during the day, make sure your blinds are closed and reduce other sources of light in the bedroom. Being exposed to sunlight after a night shift can confuse the brain so you should find ways to reduce sunlight exposure before you go to bed.

“Wear sunglasses on the way home from work,” Malhotra said. “And, conversely, before work, spend time in a well-lit room.”

Among the other tips:

• Avoid vigorous activity before you go to bed and stay busy before you go to work. Your activity level can tell your body whether it’s time for work or sleep.
• Let your family and friends know about your sleep schedule and ask them not to phone or otherwise disturb you while you’re sleeping.
• Consider seeing a sleep specialist if you notice that sleep deprivation is affecting your life. Perhaps you’re less productive at work or getting complaints on the job, losing your temper with your family or having difficulty staying awake at your child’s recital.

For some people, Malhotra said, medication can help with sleep difficulties.

Results indicate that adolescent drivers were twice as likely to have had a crash if they experienced sleepiness while driving (adjusted odds ratio = 2.1) or reported having bad sleep (OR = 1.9). Eighty of the 339 students had already crashed at least once, and 15 percent of them considered sleepiness to have been the main cause of the crash. Fifty-six percent of students who had at least one previous crash reported driving while sleepy, compared with 35 percent of subjects who had not been in a crash.

Lead author Fabio Cirignotta, M.D., professor of neurology at the University of Bologna in Italy, said that the only effective countermeasure to drowsiness is to stop driving immediately, pull over to a safe place and nap for 10 to15 minutes.

“Commonly used countermeasures to fatigue, such as opening the window, listening to the radio, or drinking a coffee, are known to be short-lasting and, essentially, useless,” said Cirignotta. “Moreover, if a subject perceives sleepiness, he or she would probably already have a reduced performance at the wheel, and nobody can safely detect the real instant when sleep is starting in order to stop driving at that time.”

This cross-sectional study was conducted in 2004 and was supported by the Italian Ministry of Education. Self-administered questionnaires were distributed to 339 students who had a driver’s license and were in their last two years of attendance at one of seven high schools in Bologna. Students were between the ages of 18 and 21 years (mean 18.4 years), and 58 percent of them were male.

Questions concerned lifestyle habits, nocturnal sleep habits, symptoms suggesting sleep disorders, and a subjective report of daytime sleepiness. Driving habits and sleepiness at the wheel were evaluated by questions assessing the frequency and timing of car use and accidents, the perceived causes of vehicle crashes and the respondents’ coping methods for dealing with sleepiness while driving.

Results show that students suffered from chronic sleep deprivation. Although they reported that their sleep need was a mean of 9.2 hours per night, the students reported sleeping for an average of only 7.3 hours on weeknights. Only six percent of students slept nine hours or more on weeknights, and 58 percent tried to catch up by sleeping nine hours or more on weekends.

Sleep problems also were commonly reported by the students. Forty-five percent woke up at least once during the night with trouble falling asleep again, 40 percent complained of difficulties in morning awakening and 19 percent reported bad sleep. The combination of chronic sleep loss and poor sleep quality had a negative effect on their alertness, as 64 percent of participants complained of excessive daytime sleepiness.

The study also found an increased risk of car accidents in men (OR = 3.3) and smokers (OR = 3.2). The authors suggested that the use of tobacco could be an indirect estimate of unhealthy lifestyle habits, as well as a method of counteracting sleepiness.

According to the authors, the study emphasizes the need for education programs that target adolescents with information about improving sleep habits, the importance of sleep and the dangers of sleep deprivation.

Source: Kelly Wagner, American Academy of Sleep Medicine

A research study conducted at Washington State University into the effects of sleep deprivation on executive functioning the ability to initiate, monitor and stop actions to achieve objectives has yielded surprising results and caused a shift in the current thinking on this topic.

Published in the January 2010 issue of the journal “SLEEP,” the study found that sleep deprivation affects distinct cognitive processes in different ways. The researchers found that working memory a key element of executive functioning was essentially unaffected by as much as 51 hours of total sleep deprivation. Instead, they saw a degradation of non-executive components of cognition, such as information intake, that accounted for the overall impairment in subjects’ performance on cognitive tasks. In other words, the sleep deprived brain appears to be capable of processing information, but this information may be distorted before it can be processed.

These results challenge an existing theory that states that sleep deprivation affects executive functions more than non-executive cognitive processes. They also show that previous experimental support for this theory was hampered by task impurity, the problem that any cognitive performance task involves a number of intertwined cognitive processes that must be distinguished to really understand the effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance.

“These findings are significant for our understanding of how sleep deprivation affects the brain,” said Hans Van Dongen, principal investigator on the study and a research professor in the WSU Sleep and Performance Research Center. “They show that a large body of research on the effects of sleep deprivation needs to be revisited to verify the conclusions, which may have been drawn incorrectly because of task impurity issues.”

The study looked at 23 subjects, who spent 6.5 consecutive days in a controlled laboratory environment. One group was kept awake for two consecutive nights (62 hours), while the other was on a normal sleep schedule. Three times throughout the experiment, the subjects completed an executive functions task battery composed of tasks that were selected because they allowed for important executive functions to be examined separately from non-executive components of cognition. The task battery measured such executive functions as working memory scanning efficiency, resistance to proactive interference and verbal fluency.

The paper was authored by Adrienne Tucker, a doctoral student in WSU’s experimental psychology program who carried out the study as part of her dissertation research. In addition to Van Dongen, her co-authors were WSU professors of psychology Paul Whitney and John Hinson and research professor Gregory Belenky, director of the Sleep and Performance Research Center. Funding for the research came from the Department of Defense Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs.

Van Dongen and his colleagues first came up with their new perspective following earlier research studies that examined individual differences in the effects of sleep deprivation, which showed that these differences depended on the task being performed.

“This suggested that sleep deprivation can affect multiple aspects of cognitive task performance in different ways, and that we should look at separate components of cognition and not just overall task performance,” Van Dongen said.

Their recent study was the first step in a new line of research the researchers are pursuing, in which they will investigate the effects of sleep deprivation on a variety of distinct cognitive processes. They are planning follow-up studies that will examine how distinct components of decision making are affected by sleep deprivation and how this influences the overall decisions people make. Ultimately, this may lead to the development of interventions that target the components of cognition most affected by sleep deprivation. Such interventions could improve decision making in situations where getting more sleep is not an option. This work will have important implications for emergency responders, police officers, military personnel and anyone required to make sound decisions in safety-critical environments with little opportunity for sleep.

About the Sleep and Performance Research Center

WSU’s Sleep and Performance Research Center includes a state-of-the-art human sleep research laboratory located on the Riverpoint Campus at WSU Spokane, and two world-class basic sleep research laboratories on the WSU Pullman campus. Also affiliated with the center are three basic sleep researchers who were recently hired to the WWAMI medical education program at WSU Spokane. The human sleep research laboratory is funded entirely with extramural grants and contracts, and accommodates carefully controlled experiments to study the effects of sleep and sleep loss on human cognitive functioning. With the recent addition of a critical job task simulation laboratory, the center’s facility in Spokane is the only one of its kind in the world.

About Washington State University Spokane

WSU Spokane is the urban campus of Washington State University, a land-grant research university founded in 1890. The campus features advanced studies and research in health sciences and health professions, the design disciplines, education, social and policy sciences, and science and technology. Washington State University is one of just 95 public and private research universities with very high research activity, according to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching classifications. In addition, U.S. News & World Report ranks WSU as one of the top public research universities in the nation.

Source: Washington State University

What are these risks? The most troubling consequences of sleepiness are injuries and deaths related to lapses in attention and delayed response times at critical moments, such as while driving. Drowsiness or fatigue has been identified as a principle cause in at least 100,000 police-reported traffic crashes each year, killing more than 1,500 Americans and injuring another 71,000, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA, 1994). Young drivers age 25 or under are involved in more than one-half of fall-asleep crashes.

The National Sleep Foundation’s (NSF) Sleep And Teens Task Force developed this report to summarize existing research about sleep-related issues affecting adolescents. We hope that this report will serve as a valuable and practical resource for parents, educators, community leaders, adolescents and others in their efforts to make informed decisions regarding health, safety and sleep-related issues within their communities.

A nonprofit, private organization, NSF is a leader in public education efforts regarding the risks associated with drowsy driving and other issues related to sleepiness and sleep loss. We welcome your comments about this report and your suggestions for expanding public awareness and supporting positive changes to protect the safety and well-being of our nation’s youth.

Source: National Sleep Foundation

Using a specialized technique called voxel-based morphometry, Ellemarije Altena and Ysbrand van der Werf from the research group of Eus van Someren evaluated the brain volumes of persons with chronic insomnia who were otherwise psychiatrically healthy, and compared them to healthy persons without sleep problems. They found that insomnia patients had a smaller volume of gray matter in the left orbitofrontal cortex, which was strongly correlated with their subjective severity of insomnia.

“We show, for the first time, that insomnia patients have lower grey matter density in brain regions involved in the evaluation of the pleasantness of stimuli, as well as in regions related to the brain’s ‘resting state’. The more severe the sleeping problems of insomniacs, the less grey matter density they have in the region involved in pleasantness evaluation, which may also be important for the recognition of optimal comfort to fall asleep,” explained Altena. She added, “Our group previously showed that insomniacs have difficulties with recognizing optimal comfort. These findings urge further investigation into the definition of subtypes of insomnia and their causal factors, for which we have now initiated the Netherlands Sleep Registry.”

Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry, commented, that “insomnia is a common feature of nearly every psychiatric condition associated with reduced cortical volume; in fact, it is a common symptom of psychiatric disorders or high levels of life stress, generally. The study by Altena and colleagues suggests that there are additional risks of not treating insomnia, such as detrimental effects on the microstructure of the brain.”

Notes:

The article is “Reduced Orbitofrontal and Parietal Gray Matter in Chronic Insomnia: A Voxel-Based Morphometric Study” by Ellemarije Altena, Hugo Vrenken, Ysbrand D. Van Der Werf, Odile A. van den Heuvel, and Eus J.W. Van Someren. The principal investigators Altena, Van Der Werf, and Van Someren are affiliated with the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. All authors are also affiliated with VU University Medical Center (VUMC), Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The article appears in Biological Psychiatry, Volume 67, Issue 2 (January 15, 2010), published by Elsevier.

The authors’ disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available in the article.

John H. Krystal, M.D. is Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and a research psychiatrist at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. His disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available here.

Source: Maureen Hunter, Elsevier

Chronic sleep deprivation and the impact “sleep debt” has on functioning and thinking cannot be reversed by one good night’s sleep, new research suggests.

While a night of good sleep can make you feel and operate better in the short run, the ill effects of long-term sleep loss linger much longer.

In fact, “chronic sleep loss from six hours of sleep per night for two weeks causes a similar level of impairment as staying awake for 24 hours,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Daniel A. Cohen, a neurologist and sleep medicine specialist affiliated with Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, both in Boston.

Chronically sleep-deprived people are “vulnerable to sudden sleepiness, errors and accidents,” Cohen added, describing the vulnerability as something that won’t disappear after a full night of “catch-up” sleep.

Cohen and his colleagues report their findings in the Jan. 13 issue of Science Translational Medicine.

They note that 16 percent of Americans are believed to routinely sleep six hours a day or less.

Such chronic sleep deprivation is thought to be most prevalent in professions that involve shift work and overtime, such as trucking and transportation, the military, the health-care industry and emergency-response organizations. Many such workers try to cope with long stretches of insufficient sleep — and the safety hazards such sleep debt poses — by sleeping for longer periods whenever they can.

But does this type of catch-up strategy help restore alertness? To find out, the researchers tracked the behavior of nine healthy men and women, 21 to 34 years old. Participants were put on a three-week sleep-wake schedule that involved staying awake for 33 hours, followed by 10 hours of sleep.

This chronic sleep deprivation routine — which they said mimicked, for example, the typical on-call schedule of a resident physician — meant that the participants slept just 5.6 hours for every 24-hour period.

Data on a second group of participants, who slept a more normal eight hours in every 24-hour period, were used as a point of comparison.

The team found that in the immediate aftermath of a 10-hour sleep period, the sleep-deprived participants did perform within normal parameters on cognitive function and reaction-time testing.

However, as the study progressed, the now chronically sleep-deprived participants’ ability to recover full function after each 10-hour sleep began to fade. Their motor skills, as well as their ability to focus, pay attention and remain alert, all weakened over the ensuring 33-hour wake period.

Relatively normal reaction times for the sleep-deprived also dissipated significantly as day turned to night. The researchers attributed this to the interplay between chronic sleep deprivation and the body’s circadian rhythms.

The bottom line: People who build up a “chronic sleep debt” during the week in the hope that they can then “pay it back” with a full night or two of sleep on the weekend are in for a disappointment.

“A long night of sleep can largely hide the effects of chronic sleep loss,” Cohen said. But he said the sense of regaining full function is illusory.

“At this point,” Cohen noted, “we still do not know how many normal sleep-wake cycles it takes to catch up on chronic sleep loss.”

Gregg D. Jacobs, a sleep specialist with the Sleep Disorders Center at University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center in Boston, said that “sleep loss is not a one-size-fits-all phenomenon” and cautioned against generalizing too much from the findings.

“The sleep schedule they studied is similar to what residency physicians would experience,” he noted. “However, very few people other than resident physicians ever undergo a sleep schedule like this. Sleep loss in daily life is much more modest for most people.”

Jacobs also noted that the participants were relatively young and that older adults often need less sleep. And he added that sleep loss and an individual’s related performance can often depend on how motivated a person is to execute a task, which can be different depending on whether sleep loss and performance is job-related or not.

“The problem with lab studies on sleep loss,” he stressed, is that “they do not generalize well to daily life.”

Source: By Alan Mozes, HealthDay Reporter