Sleep and Diseases
Lower rates of diabetes and heart disease are associated with adequate rest and recuperation. Studies have found that higher levels of glucose intolerance...
This article was brought to you by Truestar Health: The World's Most Comprehensive Nutrition, Fitness & Healthy Lifestyle Resource
Diabetes and Heart Disease
Lower rates of diabetes and heart disease are associated with adequate rest and recuperation. Studies have found that higher levels of glucose intolerance, a pre-diabetic condition, are associated with sleep deprivation.
Mental Disorders
Sleeping disorders occur in almost all people with mental disorders, including those with depression, anxiety, manic depression and schizophrenia. In addition, sleep deprivation may actually cause or contribute to depression or anxiety disorders, making it difficult to determine which came first.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
People with depression or anxiety often wake up in the early hours of the morning or soon after going to bed and find themselves unable to get back to sleep. The amount of sleep a person gets also strongly influences the symptoms of mental disorders.
Sleep deprivation can be an effective therapy for people with certain types of depression associated with a tendency to oversleep, while it can actually cause depression in others who have insomnia associated with depression. Extreme sleep deprivation can lead to a seemingly psychotic state of paranoia and hallucination in otherwise healthy people and disrupted sleep can trigger episodes of mania (agitation and hyperactivity) in people with manic depression.
Epilepsy
Sleep affects some kinds of epilepsy in complex ways. REM sleep seems to help prevent seizures that begin in one part of the brain from spreading to other brain regions, while deep sleep may promote the spread of these seizures. Sleep deprivation also triggers seizures in people with some types of epilepsy.
Pain Management
Patients who are experiencing pain and are unable to sleep may notice their pain more and increase their requests for pain medication. The interaction between sleep and pain is important in patients suffering from arthritis, fibromyalgia and other chronic pain conditions. Not only can pain disturb sleep, but alterations in the deeper sleep stages, induced by pain and inflammation, may also decrease the pain threshold, as well as the ability to heal because growth hormone, important for building body tissues, is reduced.
Did you like what you read? Click here to read more articles brought to you by Truestar Health: The World's Most Comprehensive Nutrition, Fitness & Healthy Lifestyle Resource
