News by Subject Medicine & Health

Physician burnout is a significantly underappreciated public safety issue, and sleep loss is often overlooked as a contributing factor, according to a new position statement published by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

Researchers at Notre Dame found that individuals going to bed even 30 minutes later than their usual bedtime presented a significantly higher resting heart rate that lasted into the following day.

This study used data and brain imaging from a randomized clinical trial for older adults who are cognitively unimpaired and examined brain changes, including the presence of biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease, between those with sleep-disordered breathing and those without.

Researchers of the University of Groningen and the Max Planck Institute have found that starlings sleep five hours less per night during the summer. Compared to winter, the birds take more mid-day naps and live under higher sleep pressure. During full-moon nights, starlings sleep around two hours less than usual. The findings of the study were published in the journal Current Biology on 19 March.

Nagging negative thoughts - and striving for perfection - keep teenagers awake at night, raising their chance of becoming depressed and anxious, a new study shows. An online study of almost 400 adolescents aged 14 to 20 years confirmed the link, leading sleep researchers at Flinders University to recommend alternative treatments for repetitive negative thinking and perfectionism in dealing with delayed sleep and mental health problems among teenagers.

Compared with people who slept for longer or shorter periods of time, those who reported sleeping seven or eight hours a night had significantly less evidence of stiffness in their arteries, indicating a lower chance of developing heart disease or suffering a stroke, according to research presented at the American College of Cardiology's Annual Scientific Session Together with World Congress of Cardiology (ACC.20/WCC).

A study of almost 800 children followed over several years shows that those who get the fewest hours of sleep are at greatest risk of developing psychiatric difficulties later, including ADHD, anxiety and depression.

Using a mouse model, a pair of UC Riverside researchers demonstrated the formation of fear memory involves the strengthening of neural pathways between two brain areas: the hippocampus, which responds to a particular context and encodes it, and the amygdala, which triggers defensive behavior, including fear responses.

An important biological mechanism that is thought to protect brain cells from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's may also be involved in regulating sleep, according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.