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Irregular sleep schedules linked to adverse metabolic health in women

Data from a five-year sleep study involving 161 Caucasian, 121 African American and 56 Chinese non-shift working women aged 48-58 has found that going to bed later, and having greater variability in bedtime, were associated with higher insulin resistance, and greater bedtime advance (going to bed earlier) was associated with higher body mass index (BMI).

Changes in bedtime, and later bedtimes, were partly due to shifts in bedtime at the weekend.

Diabetes risk increases in midlife women, and this finding suggests that irregular sleep schedules may be an important factor. Metabolic health was better in women who had more regular sleep schedules, including regular bedtimes across weekdays and weekends."

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-02/aaos-sli020116.php

Taylor BJ, Matthews KA, Hasler BP, Roecklein KA, Kline CE, Buysse DJ, Kravitz HM, Tiani AG, Harlow SD, Hall MH. Bedtime variability and metabolic health in midlife women: the SWAN Sleep Study. SLEEP 2016;39(2):457–465.

Midday naps associated with reduced blood pressure and fewer medications

A Greek study involving 386 middle aged patients (average age 61) with arterial hypertension has found that those who had a midday nap had lower systolic BP than those who didn't. Their average systolic BP readings were 4% lower when they were awake (5 mmHg) and 6% lower while they slept at night (7 mmHg) than non-midday sleepers .

Moreover, midday sleepers had pulse wave velocity levels that were 11% lower and left atrium diameter was 5% smaller — suggesting there is less damage in the arteries and heart. Additionally, midday sleepers had greater dips in blood pressure during the night (which is a good thing), and they took fewer antihypertensive medications.

Longer naps were better than shorter.

The research was presented at the 2015 ESC Congress.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-08/esoc-mna082815.php

Healthy lifestyle protects against stress-related cell aging

Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes that affect how quickly cells age. With age, they shorten, and as their structural integrity weakens, the cells age and die quicker. Telomere length thus is a biomarker of cellular age. Stress is also thought to shorten telomere length.

A year-long study that looked at the effects of three healthy behaviors in 239 post-menopausal, non-smoking women has found that women who engaged in lower levels of healthy behaviors showed a significantly greater telomere shortening for every major life stressor that occurred. However, stress didn't lead to greater shortening in those women who maintained active lifestyles, healthy diets, and good quality sleep.

Shorter telomeres have become associated with a broad range of aging-related diseases, including stroke, vascular dementia, cardiovascular disease, obesity, osteoporosis diabetes, and many forms of cancer.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-07/uoc--hlm072414.php

Puterman, E., Lin, J., Krauss, J., Blackburn, E. H., & Epel, E. S. (2015). Determinants of telomere attrition over 1 year in healthy older women: stress and health behaviors matter. Molecular Psychiatry, 20(4), 529–535. http://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2014.70

Reactivate if you want to remember

Submitted by Fiona McPherson on

We know sleep helps consolidate memories. Now a new study sheds light on how your sleeping brain decides what’s worth keeping. The study found that when the information that makes up a memory has a high value—associated with, for example, making more money—the memory is more likely to be rehearsed and consolidated during sleep.

Sleep loss and temporal memory

Journal Article

Harrison, Yvonne & Horne, James A. 2000. Sleep loss and temporal memory. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 53A (1), 271-279.

Recognition memory for faces was unaffected by being deprived of sleep for 35 hours.

However, sleep-deprived subjects were significantly worse in remembering in which of two sets of photos particular faces had appeared in.

Sleep-deprived subjects who had been given significant doses of caffeine remembered the set better than those who had not, but were still poorer at remembering than those not deprived of sleep.

Although their performance was poorer, sleep-deprivation seemed to increase the subjects' belief in their own accuracy.

It seems likely that sleep-deprivation affects memory for context.

In this study, subjects were shown two sets of 12 color photographs of people’s faces (24 in total). Five minutes after seeing the last one, the subjects were then shown another 48 faces (one by one, as before) and had to say whether or not they had seen the face earlier. If so, they were asked whether they saw it in the first or second set of photographs. Half the subjects had been deprived of sleep for the previous 35 hours. Some of these had been given significant amounts of caffeine to offset their sleepiness.

It was found that the sleep-deprived subjects, whether or not they had had caffeine, were as good as the non-sleep-deprived subjects at recognizing which faces they had seen before. However, the sleep-deprived subjects were significantly worse at remembering which set the faces had appeared in. This occurred even though otherwise optimum conditions for recall existed (the test was novel, stimulating, and relatively short; it was given at the best time of day for maximum alertness).

Caffeine significantly reduced the feelings of sleepiness and did appear to improve the ability of the sleep-deprived subjects to remember which set the face had appeared in, but the level of recall was still significantly below the level of the non-sleep-deprived subjects. Caffeine made no difference to the memory performance of subjects who were not sleep-deprived.

Interestingly, sleep deprivation increased the subjects’ belief that they were right, especially when they were wrong. In this case, whether or not they had had caffeine made no difference.

It may be that the problem with temporal memory reflects a more general problem with remembering context information.

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