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Posts in ‘Relazovac for sleep’

Older women who sleep little tend to fall more, study finds

Nov 13

Women age 70 and older who sleep five hours or less per night may be more likely to experience falls than those who sleep more than seven to eight hours per night, says a report in the Sept. 8 issue of a journal called Archives of Internal Medicine.

Additionally, the use of sleep medications doesn’t appear to influence the association between sleep and risk of falling, it says.

Falls pose a major health risk among older adults and are a leading cause of death, illness, and premature nursing home placement, according to back-ground information in the article. About one-third of adults older than age 65 experience a fall each year. Insomnia and disturbed sleep as well as the use of benzodiazepines, medications used to treat insomnia, are increasingly common in older adults.

The article says, though, that, “It is not established whether it is poor sleep or medications used to treat sleep disturbances that explain the increased risk of falls in those who are prescribed such medications.”

Katie L. Stone, of the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute, in San Francisco, and colleagues used wrist actigraphies, or watch-like devices, and sleep diaries to measure sleep, the percentage of time in bed spent sleeping, and frequency of falls in nearly 3,000 women age 70 and older.

Questionnaires were used to determine demographic information and use of benzodiazepines.

Participants averaged 6.8 hours of sleep per night and spent an average 77.2 minutes awake after initial sleep onset. The average number of falls one year after the collection of sleep data was 0.84. A total of 549 women, or 18.4 percent, had two or more falls during the year after the sleep assessments.

The risk of having two or more falls during the following year was higher for women who slept five hours or less per night compared with women who slept more than seven to eight hours per night. Compared with those with a sleep efficiency of 70 percent or higher, those with a sleep efficiency of less than 70 percent were 1.36 times more likely to experience a fall.

Similarly, women with greater wake time after sleep onset (120 minutes or more) were 1.33 times more likely to fall than those who spent less than 120 minutes awake after sleep onset.

In all, 214 subjects, or 7.2 percent, reported they currently use benzodiazepines. Use of any benzodiazepine (short and long combined) was associated with a 1.34-fold increase in risk of falls.

The authors of the article said future studies are needed to determine how newer drugs and cognitive behavioral therapy used to treat insomnia affect the risk of falls. Additional studies also are needed, they said, to determine whether things such as hypoxia, sleep-related breathing problems, and sleep disruption contribute independently toward risk of falls.

The study was supported by Public Health Service grants.

Copyright Northwest Business Press Inc. Sep 25, 2008
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

Relazovac for sleep, insomnia, sleep apnea, sleeping trouble     0 Comments

How Stress Affects the Immune System

Sep 26

We have known for some time that stress affects our immune systems. Many studies have shown that stress can suppress the immune system, but other studies have shown boosts in the immune system under stress. A July 2004 meta-analysis of 293 studies conducted over the past 30 years puts the pieces of the puzzle together. Psychologists Suzanne Segerstrom, Ph.D., and Gregory Miller, Ph.D. found the following:

  • Stress does indeed affect the immune system in powerful ways.
  • Short-term stressors boost the immune system. It seems that the “fight or flight” response prompts the immune system to ready itself for infections resulting from bites, punctures, scrapes or other challenges to the integrity of the body.
  • Chronic, long-term stress suppresses the immune system. The longer the stress, the more the immune system shifted from they adaptive changes seen in the “fight or flight”1 response to more negative changes, first at the cellular level and later in broader immune function. The most chronic stressors – stress that seems beyond a person’s control or seems endless – resulted in the most global suppression of immunity. Almost all measures of immune system function dropped across the board.
  • The immune systems of the elderly or those already sick are more subject to stress-related changes.

In reaching these conclusions the authors looked at the effects of the various stressors on different immune responses, such as “natural” and “specific” immunity. They summarized the results of the studies that looked at each of these types of stress:

Natural immunity produces quick-acting, all-purpose cells that can attack many pathogens; they bring fever and inflammation.

The body takes a few days to mount a more specific attack on particular invaders with specific immunity. This response includes lymphocytes (T-cells and B cells). Specific immunity has both cellular responses, which fight pathogens that get inside cells (such as viruses), and humoral responses, which fight pathogens that stay outside cells, such as bacteria and parasites. Segerstrom and Miller were able to assess how different types of immune response correlated with different types of stress because researchers have identified the blood markers of these different immune responses.

They divided stressors into different types:

Acute time-limited stressors: lab challenges such as public speaking or mental math.

Brief naturalistic stressors: real-world challenges such as academic tests.

Stressful event sequences: a focal event such as loss of a spouse or major natural disaster gives rise to a series of related challenges that people know at some point will end.

Chronic stressors: pervasive demands that force people to restructure their identity or social roles, without any clear end point – such as injury resulting in permanent disability, caring for a spouse with severe dementia, or being a refugee forced from one’s native country by war.

Distant stressors: traumatic experiences that occurred in the distant past yet can continue modifying the immune system because of their long-lasting emotional and cognitive consequences, such as child abuse, combat trauma or having been a prisoner of war. Much of their analysis goes on to review the similarities and differences among the 293 studies that they examined. These studies included a total of 18,941 subjects. “Stressful event sequences” appeared to be weakly associated with different immune consequences, depending on the type of event. There appeared to be different patterns for grief than for trauma, for example, but the associations weren’t strong enough for the authors to make new claims. They recommended further study.

The authors did find that the most chronic stressors - those which change people’s identities or social roles, are more beyond their control and seem endless - were associated with the most global suppression of immunity. In such situations almost all measures of immune function dropped across the board. The longer the stress, the more the immune system shifted from potentially adaptive changes (such as those in the acute “fight or flight” response) to potentially detrimental changes, at first in cellular immunity and then in broader immune function. This analysis suggests that stressors that turn a person’s world upside down and appear to offer no hope for the future probably have the greatest psychological and physiological impact.

The authors also found that age and disease status affected a person’s vulnerability to stress-related decreases in immune function. It seems that illness and age make it harder for the body to regulate itself.

This is a ground-breaking meta-analysis that helps us understand the complex relationship between stress and the immune system. It should lead to new treatments and to better stress management programs, especially for patients with HIV or other disorders that compromise immunity.

Reference: Segerstrom & Miller, 2004. Psychological Stress and the Human Immune System: A Meta-Analytic Study of 30 Years of Inquiry Psychological Bulletin, 130, 4.

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©2008 About.com, Inc., a part of The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.

Complementary medicines, Relazovac for sleep, Relazovac for stress, Uncategorized, alternative, antidepressants, can't sleep, exercise, side effects, sleeping trouble, stress     0 Comments