Lack of Sleep Can Affect Your Health
From the July 6, 2003 edition of the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution comes an article about how loss of sleep over a
period of time can have dire consequences on your health. The article
states, "Recent research indicates that chronic under-sleeping does more
than undermine productivity or make people more irritable.
It also
increases the risk of accidents and may contribute to serious, long-term
problems such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease."
The article notes that according to the National
Sleep Foundation up to 60 percent of Americans report at least occasional
sleep problems. A national study published this year tracking 71,617
nurses found that women who got five hours of sleep or less nightly over a
decade had a 39 percent greater risk of heart attack than those who
managed eight hours. Scientists at the University of Chicago also found
that building up a sleep "debt" over a matter of days can impair
metabolism and disrupt hormone levels. After restricting 11 healthy young
adults to four hours of sleep for six nights, researchers found their
ability to process glucose (sugar) in the blood had declined, in some
cases to the level of diabetics.
Dr. Carl E. Hunt, director of the National Center on
Sleep Disorders Research in Washington notes, "Basically healthy adults
who are acutely sleep-restricted tend to eat more, and what they eat more
of tends to be carbohydrates and high in fat." One study published this
year found that after two weeks of four-hour sleep, a group of healthy
young adults performed as poorly on tests of alertness, memory and mental
agility as those who had gone without any sleep for two nights. And they
didn't seem aware of their gradually deteriorating performance.
Sleep also adds benefits to health. Researchers who
scanned sleepers' brains found that the areas involved in learning new
tasks remain active in slumber. This suggests that sleep plays a role in
storing information for future retrieval. Dr. Steven M. Scharf, medical
director of the University of Maryland Sleep Disorders Center summed up
the situation nicely when he said, "I like the old days, when they played
'The Star-Spangled Banner' on TV everybody went to bed."
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