News by Subject Medicine & Health

Women with severe sleep apnea appear to be at an elevated risk of getting cancer, a study shows. No causal relationship is demonstrated, but the link between nocturnal hypoxia in women and higher cancer risk is still clear.

A paper published today in Pediatrics suggests that children and youth who do not sleep enough and use screens more than recommended are more likely to act impulsively and make poorer decisions.

Hormone changes are known to alter insulin sensitivity and glucose metabolism, as well as interfere with women's sleep patterns. But little was known about the association between diabetes and sleep disturbances during the menopause transition until now, as a new study concludes that women with diabetes are at greater risk for sleep disturbances. Study results are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS).

The 'double whammy' of co-occurring insomnia and obstructive sleep apnea is a complex problem best managed with non-drug targeted psych interventions, a new Australian study has found. By following simple new guidelines, people with the concurrent conditions reported great improvement to both their sleep, and their health -- with about 50% improvement in global insomnia severity and night-time insomnia after six months.

Are you tired? A new study of young and middle-aged adults shows it could be happening because of the way society functions in your part of the world. Researchers from Flinders University and the University of Helsinki collaborated with Finnish company, Polar, to compare the sleeping habits of 17,335 people wearing fitness trackers to measure their 14 day sleep patterns.

Researchers have noted excessive daytime napping can develop long before memory problems of Alzheimer's disease appear. Prior studies considered excessive daytime napping compensation for poor nighttime sleep caused by Alzheimer's-related disruptions in sleep-promoting brain regions; others argued that the sleep problems contribute to progression of the disease. But now UC San Francisco scientists have provided a new explanation for this phenomenon, showing that Alzheimer's disease directly attacks brain regions responsible for daytime.

A quirk of the body clock that lures some people to sleep at 8 p.m., enabling them to greet the new day as early as 4 a.m., may be significantly more common than previously believed.

One of the largest longitudinal studies to date examined evening consumption of alcohol, caffeine and nicotine among an African-American cohort and objectively measured sleep outcomes in their natural environments instead of laboratory or observatory settings. The study involved 785 participants and totaled 5,164 days of concurrent actigraphy and daily sleep diaries that recorded how much alcohol, caffeine or nicotine they consumed within four hours of bedtime. Results may be good news for coffee lovers, bad news for smokers.