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Sleep disorders news

Sleep disorders

Oxytocin may reduce mood changes in women with disrupted sleep

Oxytocin, often called "the love hormone," may play a protective role in mood disturbances triggered by sleep loss and hormonal shifts during key reproductive transitions like postpartum and menopause, according to a study ...

Addiction

Effects of poor sleep may contribute to alcohol problems in college students

Certain behavioral effects of not getting enough sleep may explain why people who have insomnia are at risk for problems with alcohol. A study of college students, published in Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research, ...

Sleep disorders

Verbal response time reveals hidden sleepiness in older adults

A new study led by UCLA investigators shows that Verbal Reaction Time (VRT), the amount of time it takes a person to respond verbally, can be a marker of sleepiness in older adults. The study, which measured participants' ...

Health

How dairy might disrupt your sleep and dreams

Ebenezer Scrooge tried to wave away the ghost of Jacob Marley by blaming the apparition on "an undigested bit of beef … a crumb of cheese." Charles Dickens might have been writing fiction, but the idea that late-night dairy ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Cheese may really be giving you nightmares, scientists find

Scientists have found that eating too much dairy could ruin your sleep. Researchers questioned more than 1,000 students about the quality of their sleep, their eating habits, and any perceived link between the two, and found ...

Health

Why frequent nightmares may shorten your life by years

Waking up from a nightmare can leave your heart pounding, but the effects may reach far beyond a restless night. Adults who suffer bad dreams every week were almost three times more likely to die before age 75 than people ...

Sleep disorders

Silent night: Anatomical solutions for snoring

Snoring is often dismissed as a harmless quirk—or the punchline of bedtime jokes—but it can signal deeper issues that go beyond mere acoustic annoyance.

Neuroscience

Blinding lights: The hidden science behind gambling's glow

There's a reason casinos rarely have windows or clocks, they're engineered to make you lose track of time. But what if it's not just time you're losing? New research suggests that the lighting used in gambling environments ...

Genetics

Are some children genetically predisposed to poor sleep?

Previous research has identified genetic variants associated with insomnia and sleep duration in adults. Now a study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry has found that these variants also likely affect ...

Cardiology

Poor night's sleep can trigger atrial fibrillation the next day

We all know that a lousy night's sleep can leave us feeling drained the next day. Now a study by UC San Francisco has found another reason to catch more Z's: poor sleep is tied to significantly higher odds of experiencing ...

Alzheimer's disease & dementia

Improving deep sleep may prevent dementia, study finds

As little as 1% reduction in deep sleep per year for people over 60 years of age translates into a 27% increased risk of dementia, according to a study which suggests that enhancing or maintaining deep sleep, also known as ...

Sleep disorders

How can I get some sleep? Which treatments actually work?

Do you have difficulty falling asleep? Do you stay awake for a long time at night? Do these sleep problems make you feel fatigued, strung-out, or exhausted during the day? Has this been happening for months?

Neuroscience

Research reveals how sleep disruption can exacerbate pain

People often experience headaches and body pain after a lack of sleep, but the mechanisms behind this phenomenon are unclear. A new study led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a founding member of ...

Health

Is it okay to press the snooze button?

It is often claimed that using the snooze button can have negative effects on sleep and cognitive processes, but there has been no direct evidence to this effect. New research from the Department of Psychology at Stockholm ...