Insomnia

The following is extracted from https://www.painscience.com/articles/insomnia.php for the full article (it is very long) click on the link.

I have tried to put the main points of the article below

Some insomnia is caused by sleep disorders such as Delayed sleep phase syndrome (DSPS) or sleep apnea. Or sleep loss may be caused by the pain of another medical condition, such as rheumatoid arthritis. But most insomnia is basically just a bad habit — a learned behaviour, which is usually aggravated into a crisis by emotional stresses.

Here in Vancouver, University of British Columbia psychologist Stanley Coren describes sleep deprivation studies in humans showing a number of ominous effects, and his book Sleep Thieves: An eye-opening exploration into the science and mysteries of sleep generally comes to the conclusion that everyone needs to take sleep deprivation much more seriously than we generally do.

Here are several examples:

•    Insomnia hurts. An internet survey of over 2,500 people with fibromyalgia (a chronic pain condition) showed that insomnia was one of the most commonly identified aggravating factors. There is good reason to believe that what makes fibromyalgics hurt probably predisposes healthier people in the direction of increased sensitivity as well. Another survey found the fairly spectacular statistic that 53% of chronic low back pain patients had insomnia, compared with only 3% in pain-free controls.

•     Insomnia saps your migraine defenses. A study of 1869 migraines clearly showed that “sleep obviously protects against [migraine] attacks rather than provokes them,” while a whopping 29% were actually caused by insomnia. I don’t know about you, but anything that protects against migraine attacks is good and I don’t want to lose much of it.

•    Insomnia makes you sick. It is strongly linked to metabolic syndrome (the term for a stew of factors associated with obesity, poor fitness, diabetes, and heart disease). A statistical analysis of insomnia’s relationship to absences from work caused by illness clearly found that there’s a connection: insomnia is followed by periods of increased absenteeism from illness and disease. Yikes! As if that weren’t bad enough: the evidence shows that the effect is prominent up to two years after insomnia. Shudder. And still more: a 2009 paper shows that people with even minor sleep problems (less than 7 hours per night) get almost three times as many head colds.

•    Insomnia can wreck your mood. 40% of psychiatric mood disorders are preceded by insomnia, and insomnia sets in at the same time as another 20% of mood disorders.

This is just a sampling. For a complete discussion of how insomnia probably increases body pain of all kinds (and muscle pain in particular), see Insomnia Until it Hurts.

The cure for insomnia was ultimately simple, and consisted of a simple 2-point plan:

•         Sleep environment upgrading

•         Behavioural conditioning

Everyone’s circumstances are different, and the solutions will be unique, but stop at nothing to make your bedroom as sleep-friendly as humanly possible.

Buy the best mattress money can buy, get a deluxe pillow, and 900 thread count sheets. Fix the leaky tap. If your partner snores, get rid of them: separate bedrooms, etc.

Sleep is a complex human behaviour, and insomnia is a dysfunctional sleep behaviour — sleep behaviour that results in sleep that is at odds with what we want, usually not enough of it and at the wrong times. Either we start sleeping at the wrong time, and/or we can’t continue sleeping as long as we’d like, and/or we can’t sleep as deeply as we need to.

The sum of our sleep behaviours is called our “sleep hygiene.” Insomniacs usually have lousy sleep hygiene.

Most insomniacs, when they have trouble falling sleep, get frustrated, get up, and do something. This is dangerous. Depending on the activity, this is a message to your brain. The message is, “1:00 AM is for checking my email. Reading a book. Watching a bit of boring telly. Having a snack.” Your ancestors didn’t have those options. Through most of our biological history, they literally couldn’t even put on a light!

It’s this simple: whatever you repeatedly do at 1:00 AM, that is exactly what your brain will think 1:00 AM is about! You are teaching your nervous system not to sleep, and like the miraculously adaptable thing that it is … it learns.

To have any hope of sleeping through the night, you have to have a consistent bedtime and a consistent waking time.

Training for recovery from behavioural insomnia is usually most easily cured by restricting sleep to an inadequate, fixed period each night, and then gradually increasing it. It’ll be unpleasant at first … but you’ve got nothing to lose.

By compressing your Total Time In Bed into just a few hours, the message to the body is "this is all you're getting, so make the best of it."

Instructions:

1.       Start with a 6-hour period, give or take: less than you need, but more than you are getting.

2.       Set the waking time you want to stick with. Count six hours backwards from that time to get your new bedtime. i.e. if you want to get up at 7:00am for the rest of your life, your new training bedtime is 1:00am.

3.       Start this on a weekend or when you have a day or even a week off from work. You don’t want to operate heavy machinery, or make important decisions, when you’re starting this process! You will almost certainly lose even more sleep than usual. You’ll lose sleep during your sleep period and have no opportunity to recover … until the next night.

4.       Do not nap at all or strictly limit napping. This is a significant challenge in itself. Do whatever you have to do. For the serious insomniac, a lot is at stake. All I can tell you is that it’s worth it.

5.       Repeat for 3-14 days. Decide in advance how long to try the strategy, and stick to it. Basically, the worse your insomnia, the longer you need to really reinforce the “idea” that you’ve only got a few hours to sleep each night.

6.       At the end of the first phase, move your training bedtime 15-30 minutes earlier, and repeat for another 3-14 days. Increase your sleep in smaller increments for difficult cases.

7.       The sleep “pressure” will accumulate enough so that you can hardly imagine not sleeping in the time available.

Ritual is particularly important for insomniacs who have trouble falling asleep. Spend some time and create a carefully planned and scheduled bedtime ritual of at least half an hour to repeat every night until you are cured, and frequently for the rest of your life.

The purpose of the ritual is to (a) wind down, and (b) learn to associate your bedtime with a series of predictable steps. It actually makes a difference whether you wash your face and then brush your teeth, or brush your teeth and then wash your face — it doesn’t matter which order you do it in, but it does matter that you always do it in the same order. The more consistent the ritual, the more quickly your brain can learn that face washing followed by teeth brushing equals bedtime.

Some improvements in sleep hygiene combined with sleep compression therapy alone will resolve behavioural insomnia for most people within 4-6 weeks.

I would recommend you read the entire article as there is a much useful information especially if you are an insomniac.

Drinking tea could help stave off cognitive decline

The following is from  the MNT Knowledge Center and written by Honor Whiteman

Thanks to its high levels of antioxidants, tea has been linked to a lower risk of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. However, its potential health benefits may not end there. Researchers have found that regular tea consumption could more than halve the risk of cognitive decline for older adults, particularly for those with a genetic risk of Alzheimer's disease.

New research suggests that regular tea intake could lower the risk of cognitive decline in later life.

Tea is one of the most popular beverages in the United States; in 2015, more than 3.6 billion gallons of tea were consumed in the country, with black tea being the favourite.

The possible health benefits of tea consumption have been well documented. A recent study published in The American Journal of Public Health, for example, associated moderate tea intake with a reduced risk of cardiovascular events.

Past research has suggested that drinking tea may also have brain benefits, with one study linking green tea consumption to better working memory.

For this latest study, lead investigator Feng Lei, from the Department of Psychological Medicine at National University of Singapore's (NUS) Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, and colleagues sought to determine whether there might be a link between tea intake and cognitive decline.

The researchers came to their findings - published in The Journal of Nutrition, Health & Aging - by collecting data from 957 Chinese adults aged 55 and older.

Between 2003 and 2005, the team collected information on the participants' tea consumption, including how much tea they drink, the frequency of tea consumption, and what types of tea they consume.

Every 2 years until 2010, the participants underwent standardised assessments that evaluated their cognitive function.

The researchers identified 72 new cases of neurocognitive disorders among participants between 2006 and 2010.

Compared with adults who rarely drank tea, those who consumed tea regularly were found to have a 50 percent lower risk of cognitive decline.

Furthermore, among adults who possessed the APOE e4 gene - which is associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer's disease - those who drank tea regularly were found to be at 86 percent lower risk of cognitive decline.

These findings remained after accounting for numerous confounding factors, including the presence of other medical conditions, social activity, physical activity, and other lifestyle factors.

The researchers note that the cognitive benefits were seen with consumption of tea that was brewed from tea leaves, such as green tea, black tea, and oolong tea.

The study was not designed to pinpoint the mechanisms behind tea's potential brain benefits, but Lei says that it could be down to the beneficial compounds the beverage contains, such as theaflavins, catechins, thearubigins, and L-theanine.

"These compounds exhibit anti-inflammatory and antioxidant potential and other bioactive properties that may protect the brain from vascular damage and neurodegeneration," Lei explains. "Our understanding of the detailed biological mechanisms is still very limited so we do need more research to find out definitive answers."

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), around 47.5 million people worldwide are living with dementia, and there are around 7.7 million new cases of the condition every year. By 2050, it is estimated that the number of people living with dementia will have risen to 135.5 million.

Although the study from Lei and team was conducted in Chinese adults, the researchers say that their findings are likely to apply to other populations, and they could have important implications for the prevention of dementia.

"Despite high-quality drug trials, effective pharmacological therapy for neurocognitive disorders such as dementia remains elusive and current prevention strategies are far from satisfactory.

Tea is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world. The data from our study suggests that a simple and inexpensive lifestyle measure such as daily tea drinking can reduce a person's risk of developing neurocognitive disorders in late life.

Happy July 4th to my American Friends

The Travel and Leisure website has a list of the top towns to celebrate this holiday The high-ranking towns for July 4th tended to score well in founding-father-friendly categories like charming main streets, parades, and feeling patriotic.

While most offer festivities like watermelon-eating contests, dog parades, or fireworks, other winners just exude enough star-spangled pomp to feel like a trip back in time. In Lambertville, NJ, or New Hope, PA, you can walk the same streets where Washington’s army marched, or eat pizza at the same corner where his troops once camped for the night.

The winning town of Flagstaff, AZ, can't claim any direct ties to 1776, but, like Boulder, makes up for that with more than enough fanfare.

For a complete list of America's Favourite cities as voted by the folks who visit Travel and Leisure.com go to:

http://www.travelandleisure.com/americas-favorite-places/cities 

High BMI as a senior, can have a negative impact on cognition

The following is from Medical News Today and was published in October 2016

There are plenty of reasons it's important to maintain a healthy weight, and now you can add one more to the list: It may be good for your brain.

Researchers from the University of Arizona have found that having a higher body mass index, or Body Mass Index (BM!), can negatively impact cognitive functioning in older adults.

"The higher your BMI, the more your inflammation goes up," said Kyle Bourassa, lead author of the study, which is published in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity. "Prior research has found that inflammation - particularly in the brain - can negatively impact brain function and cognition."

Previous studies also have linked higher BMI - an index of body fat based on height and weight - to lower cognitive functioning. But how and why the two are connected was far less clear.

"We saw this effect, but it's a black box. What goes in between?" said Bourassa, a UA psychology doctoral student. "Establishing what biologically plausible mechanisms explain this association is important to be able to intervene later."

Bourassa and his co-author, UA psychology professor David Sbarra, analyzed data from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging, which includes over 12 years' worth of information on the health, well-being and social and economic circumstances of the English population age 50 and older.

Using two separate samples from the study - one of about 9,000 people and one of about 12,500 - researchers looked at aging adults over a six-year period. They had information on study participants' BMI, inflammation and cognition, and they found the same outcome in both samples.

"The higher participants' body mass at the first time point in the study," Bourassa said, "the greater the change in their CRP levels over the next four years. CRP stands for C-reactive protein, which is a marker in the blood of systemic inflammation in your body. Change in CRP over four years then predicted change in cognition six years after the start of the study. The body mass of these people predicted their cognitive decline through their levels of systemic inflammation."

The findings support existing literature linking inflammation to cognitive decline and take it a step further by illuminating the important role of body mass in the equation.

Sbarra added a word of caution in trying to understand the findings.

"The findings provide a clear and integrative account of how BMI is associated with cognitive decline through systemic inflammation, but we need to remember that these are only correlational findings," he said. "Of course, correlation does not equal causation. The findings suggest a mechanistic pathway, but we cannot confirm causality until we reduce body mass experimentally, then examine the downstream effects on inflammation and cognition."

"Experimental studies finding whether reducing inflammation also improves cognition would be the gold standard to establish that this is a causal effect," Bourassa added.

Cognitive decline is a normal part of aging, even in healthy adults, and can have a significant impact on quality of life. The current research may provide valuable insights for possible interventions and new research directions in that area.

"If you have high inflammation, in the future we may suggest using anti-inflammatories not just to bring down your inflammation but to hopefully also help with your cognition," Bourassa said.

Of course, maintaining a healthy weight is also good for overall health, he added.

"Having a lower body mass is just good for you, period. It's good for your health and good for your brain," Bourassa said.