The sleep doctors are coming and they want you to go to bed. On time. Tonight. Every night. Or else.
They want doctors to add a single question to routine checks of vital signs like body temperature, pulse, blood pressure and rate of breathing. The question is: How did you sleep?
If you’re like most people, probably not well, or at least not enough.
The scientific evidence is mounting that getting less than the recommended seven to nine hours of nightly sleep is having wide-ranging impacts on our bodies, our minds and, especially, on the health of our children, who need even more sleep: 10 to 11 hours per night.
In March, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared that “insufficient sleep is a public health epidemic.” It released a survey showing that more than 35 per cent of U.S. adults reported getting less than seven hours of sleep a night; 38 per cent reported unintentionally falling asleep at least once during the day in the preceding month.
The six men and one woman, average age 24, took an intravenous test to measure how their bodies responded to glucose, and researchers biopsied samples of fat cells from their abdomens to test how the cells responded to insulin. Compared to results from the same tests carried out when the volunteers were well-rested, their bodies’ insulin response had decreased by an average of 16 per cent and insulin sensitivity of their fat cells decreased by 30 per cent—levels comparable to the differences between lean and obese people, and those with diabetes compared to those without. While the link between sleep, obesity and diabetes has become a burgeoning area of research, this was the first time someone had shown how sleep changes human metabolism at a molecular level. Even our fat cells, the researchers concluded, need sleep.
They also presented and discussed hundreds of studies probing the links between sleep loss and increased risk of all kinds of physical, emotional and intellectual impairments: from depression and suicidal thoughts to increased pain sensitivity and inflammation; from memory failures to a weakened ability to judge subtle social cues, such as the sexual receptiveness of a potential mate. On the frontlines of sleep science there is no area of human function that isn’t affected by this far-reaching—yet largely preventable—health affliction of our times.
read more: http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/06/17/the-sleep-crisis/