PTSD

People everywhere are suffering from PTSD, and it isn’t only people who have served in the military. Men, women, and children all over the world suffer from some form of PTSD whether they have been in the military, have been sexually assaulted, or have been a part of some other form of traumatic event. One person’s PTSD isn’t any less real or painful than someone else’s, and the article by Dr. Lavie introduces objective and subjective findings for the immediate and long term effects as well as two different forms of treatment that can help ease patients into a better, healthier form of sleep.

They found in the subjective effects that people suffered from sleep disturbances almost immediately after the trauma, also fear and anxiety plague the patients. Something pretty interesting they found too was the fact that women were had a 50% higher chance to suffer from these effects. In their findings for long term effects patients suffered from a variety of sleep problems such as difficulty falling asleep, frequent awakenings, and most commonly trauma-related anxiety dreams. It was noted that some people continue to go through this for over 40 years, like I couldn’t imagine the pain and stress they feel on a daily basis.

On the objective side patient’s sleeping habits were observed and they found that the patients did have awakenings but there weren’t any signs of insomnia which is obviously something clearly different from the subjective effects. For the long term patients seemed to have a longer sleep latency, less time sleeping, and other various sleep problems.

To combat these findings, the article gave examples of two types of treatment behavioral and pharmacologic, the most practiced of behavioral being progressive muscle relaxation for those who are very anxious near bedtime. They even limited the amount of time spent in the bed to help make the bed a more peaceful environment for them. For pharmacologic treatment many things are claimed to be effective but there isn’t significant proof, but benzodiazepine hypnotics have been proven to help with sleepiness.

This work is pretty freaking amazing. I knew that people who suffered from PTSD often had night terrors and flash backs and stuff like that, but I never knew that this disorder took this big of a toll on these people. I can barely handle the day to day stress of just a normal day sometimes I cannot imagine the psychological toll this takes. 

Can Sleep Deprivation Be a Good Thing?

Have you ever had a bad day where you feel like you just want to crawl into bed and cry your eyes out? It’s okay everyone does from time to time, sometimes we even cry some much until we literally can’t cry anymore. Don’t you feel so much better afterwards though, to the point where you just fall asleep at the drop of a dime? I get it I do sleep after a really rough day can be so therapeutic, but what if it’s not? Well therapeutic to some at least.

In the case study by Roy-Byrne the experimenters have come across the claim that people with panic disorders actually benefit from being sleep deprived over a night. So they set out to test the effects of sleep deprivation among patients that suffer from panic disorders and then compare them with patients who are depressed and have been observed in the unit on a prior occasion. They planned on monitoring their data using EEG due to known abnormalities that are caused by the panic disorder combined with lack of sleep.

Patients with panic disorder went one night without sleep and performed an EEG the next day, their mood and behavior were scored every other hour by a nurse, the patients also self-rated themselves based on mood and cognition.

The results show that the depressed patients showed improvement with depression but not so much with anxiety, the patients who suffered from panic disorders didn’t show any significant difference, and the depression patients benefited more overall than the patients with panic disorders.

I honestly for one do not like this study, like honestly even if this information is sound and the logic behind it is credible it is not a healthy way to fix depression or panic disorders. Going without sleep can cause a huge deficit in your mental and physical performance in the long run. I’m not sure if it works that fast but wouldn’t the improvement the patients be seeing come from the rally effect, a symptom of sleep deprivation?

I don’t think the public can benefit from this article, I mean it is interesting and different to say the least but fixing a crippling disorder by doing further harm to your body isn’t really benefiting anyone. I mean I guess you can say by knowing to not, not sleeping is what you can take away from the article.

I commented on Bisma's blog

Melatonin & Breast Cancer

Breast Cancer claims so many lives each and every year, mothers, daughters, and sisters from their families. But Researchers and Doctors are steadily hard at work to figure out the factors that contribute to cancer as well as ways to avoid it. Needless to say one of the obvious ways to counter cancer is sleep, SURPRISE! I know I didn’t see it coming either.

This was demonstrated in the case study by M. Kakizaki attempting to assess the relationship between the duration of sleep and the risk of getting breast cancer. They questioned 23,995 women in the age range of 40-79 years old from northeastern Japan and then separated them by their sleep habits into 4 different sleep groups, those who slept <6 hours, <7 hours, <8 hours, and >9 hours a day.

They found that the patients who sleep 6 hours or less had a greater risk of getting cancer as well as used contraception and be premenopausal. On the other end, patients who were known to sleep 9 hours or more were older, with a low caloric intake, educational level, and other diseases. While those who slept 7 hours showed an inverse relationship between sleep and breast cancer.

Overall there was less of a risk of getting breast cancer with those patients who slept a little longer. The experimenters suggest that Melatonin contributes to this decrease, that being that those with less melatonin being secreted the greater the risk becomes promoting a gonadotropin-releasing hormone.

Okay I have a question; it might be a rather naïve question but it popped into my head. I thought GRH as stated above was only or rather mainly used when presenting the sex of the prenatal fetus, so do we always use this hormone and for what?

I have also come to realize that sleep is honestly SUPER important I mean it can even help decrease the risk of cancer. I mean I’m sure all of us were knew very well that sleep is a very valuable thing before we took this class but going over all these different aspects of our lives that sleep affects is mind-blowing and also kind of scary when you think of it. Like think back to all those ties where you thought “Nah, I’m okay I got this, an all-nighter is fineee” and even still while in the class some nights I’m like it’s worth it to stay up those extra few hours for the sake of my grade. But seriously sleep is crazy important.

Practice (and sleep) Makes Perfect

You know those dreams, or more like this weird half sleep half-awake trance thing that you have the night before a test where you’re going over the information over and over again in your head? Do you really think it helps? I mean we all can’t monitor ourselves like some kind of sleepwalking case study patient, luckily we have YouTube.

In the article by Mazza, experimenters wanted to thoroughly investigate whether sleep really does aid in the efficiency of learning retention and proving that memory is enhanced by practice and sleep. During the procedure the 40 participants were asked to learn 16 words that were translated from Swahili to French using repeated retrieval-restudy practice. They were also broken up into 2 groups, a wake group and a sleep group, and later they formed a control group of 20 participants. The participants were then reassessed a week and 6 months later. In the wake group the participants initial fist session was at 9:00am and the stayed awake until 9:00pm the same day, as for the sleep group their first session was 9:00pm then they slept and took their next session at 9:00am the next day. Them a week and 6 months later all the groups performed a midday recall test without corrective feedback.

 

They found that sleep is a very beneficial effect on learning and relearning for long term retention. More specifically the unrecallable items were acquired faster during relearning in the sleep group independently of initial retention, and both speed and recall ended up being positively correlated with the time spent sleep. Demonstrating that memories not clearly accessible at the beginning of relearning had been transformed during sleep.

Before this study I didn’t really think about how sleep really affected the way we learned, like I knew about memory consolidation and how it is good to sleep in order to retain things we have learned but not to the extent of speed and accuracy of memory recall, and I wish I would have known sooner because I probably would have gotten a lot more sleep these last 20 years, just add it to my current sleep debt I guess.

This article is great for the general public of all ages whether you’re learning your very words, studying for a test, or just trying to keep your mind sharp.

Quitting is Only a Sniff Away

In the Arzi article the experimenters wanted to determine whether conditioning between cigarette odor and unpleasant odors during sleep and whether or not it would reduce cigarette-smoking behavior compared with similar conditioning during wakefulness.  So they brought in 76 participants in who wanted to quit smoking, after all the qualifying procedures were done they ended up with a total of 66 participants.

The experiments were conducted in a designated olfactory sleep laboratory that was coated in stainless steel to prevent ambient odor and was subserved by high efficiency particulate air and carbon filtration to further assure an odor free environment. During the experiment the participants were exposed to three different odors, a cigarette smoke smell, ammonium sulfide dissolved in water, and a rotting fish smell; it was determined that these smells did not did not waken participants. These smells were taken in by the participants through a nasal mask that they wore, the participants were given a steady air flor of 6L per minute.

In conclusion, hey found that nasal airflow is sensitive to sleep stage a while implicit olfactory aversive conditioning between the cigarette smell and other unpleasant odors does overall reduce smoking behavior profoundly, the reduction in smoking behavior was greater and lasted longer while the participant was in stage 2 sleep as compared to REM sleep. They also found that the explicit olfactory aversive condition during wakefulness did not alter smoking behavior but the presentation of aversive odors alone reduced smoking behavior but only by half.

I thought this article was super interesting I have never heard about using olfactory learning as a way to curb unpleasant habits let alone using sleep to achieve this. I believe that the effects of the conditioning were greater in stage 2 sleep due to the participants being in slow wave sleep thus a deeper sleep than in REM sleep.

This is a great article for anyone who is trying to quit smoking for good, I wonder what other things you could try to condition in our sleep?

Frontal Lobe

Since being in this class I have come to learn that sleep can affect so many things within our lives, our mood, our behavior, how we think and act, and even our weight. But I am still in awe of the mighty power of sleep and how easy it is to take it for granted but unfortunately it is not so easy to recover from it, and that can have terrible consequences to various parts of our brain and its overall function. How long do you think you would have to sleep in order to fix your sleep debt?

In the article Frontal Lobe, it explains how total sleep deprivation has many terrible effects on your frontal lobe including: reduced response inhibition, decision making, thought process, and speech. It also affects our alertness and relative metabolic rates. SO the experimenters set out to test whether relative cerebral glucose metabolism in the frontal lobe would be decreased as a result of total sleep deprivation. They tested their hypothesis using 32 subjects giving all of them IV’s filled with 5 mCi of FDG and simultaneously taking a performance test.

In their “After Sleep Deprivation” results they found that there was significant decline in metabolism cortical association regions (frontal lobe, temporal and occipital cortex, and subcortical system) as well as an increase in metabolism in cortical regions. Also in the “After Sleep Deprivation” there was significant relative increases in metabolism in cortical regions and also relative decreases in metabolism in subcortical areas.

I thought this article was interesting and different than any other article we’ve done so far in that it focuses more of how sleep deprivation directly affects the brain and the specific areas that it has a direct impact on.

It’s important for the public to know how sleep deprivation works and what it really does to the body, it practically sucks the life out of us and messes with all of our faculties. I know when I am dog tired I feel like I am slowly losing my mind, I can’t focus or concentrate on what I need to do, and it’s like there is a bunch of noise going on in my head and I can’t formulate a proper thought or sentence. It is important for people to know that you need sleep more so than just for the sake of not being cranky, building up all the sleep debt can seriously hurt you in the long run.

Are You Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired?

Don’t you hate that time of year when it seems like the entire campus is sick? So do I! I mean you’re just sitting in class minding your own business trying to get your education and BAM, you are bombarded with coughs and sneezes from every direction while you try all you can to protect yourself. You down a couple of vitamin C gummies (yes gummies I prefer them to the tablets) or maybe some Airborne, but sooner or later you are betrayed by your body and you wonder “Why me?”. Well let’s see, you thought you did everything you could do right, you have your gummies, your Airborne, even your recently acquired stockpile of OJ but you still ended up sick. Well as Dr. Scullin would point out, “How much sleep did you get?”

In the article Common Cold they set out to see if measured sleep behavior could be predictors in participant susceptibility to the common cold. Data was collected over a span of 4 years and included 164 participants with ages ranging from 18-55. The participants went through various medical screenings as well as interviews and questionnaires to assess emotion, they also wore and Actigraphy watch to monitor sleep behavior. The participants were given nasal drops which contained the virus (rhinovirus) and then quarantined for 5 days (participants were compensated $1,000), each day they had to do a nasal lavage, and a nasal mucociliary clearance function to test for infection. The experimenters also measured sleep behavior by total sleep time and fragmentation index.

The experimenters concluded that a threshold effect of <6 hours of sleep resulted in a higher risk of obtaining the cold, demonstrating that a shorter duration of sleep does in fact result in increased rates of cold development. They also found that the various covariates they screened for previously as well as fragmentation did not significantly contribute to risk rates.

Personally the very first thing I thought when reading the intro was “I hope these people were paid handsomely for willingly being infected with a virus” like come on I hate being sick so I am glad they got something out of this. I also thought it was interesting that there might be a correlation between longer duration of sleep (>9 hours) and disease, I think I would like to know more about that. This study definitely reinforces that no matter how well you try to take care of your body if you aren't getting the proper amount of sleep your efforts are ultimately futile.

The public would definitely benefit from this article because we all get super busy during certain times of the year and we forget to take care of ourselves and having this information can just be a reminder that during the times where you know you’re the busiest or it’s a time where you’re more likely to get sick you can stop and ask yourself “Am I getting enough sleep?”