The Detrimental Effects of Alcohol and Nicotine on Sleep

Everybody knows that a cup of coffee before sleep will keep you awake, and a glass of red wine will put you away, but a new study  reveals that while red wine may make you drowsy, it comes at a steep price to your sleep quality. More surprisingly, it found that caffeine may not affect sleep deprivation in any serious way, at all.

What they found, surprisingly enough, was that nicotine and alcohol actually had a far greater detrimental effect on participants’ sleep cycles compared to caffeine.

Drinking an alcoholic beverage or consuming nicotine in any form 4 hours before sleep was associated with fragmentary sleep, with nicotine having a severe effect on people reported suffering from insomnia, and was associated with a loss of about 40 minutes worth of sleep.

And it’s not necessarily cigarettes that keep you awake, either. The problems with nicotine arise when the body begins hankering for a fix while you’re still asleep, leading you to wake up earlier than you intended to.

The research studied the evening consumption of alcohol, nicotine and caffeinated drinks of 785 people over a combined period of 5,164 days, tracking the duration and quality of sleep through the use of actigraphy (a method of monitoring sleep through worn sensors) and participants own sleep diaries.

Meanwhile, alcohol could cause permanent damage to our circadian sleep cycle through altering genes related to our biological clock, also causing chronic inflammation and liver disease.

And while caffeine definitely gets a bad rap as an inducer of sleep deprivation, the researchers could find no connection between consumption of caffeinated drinks, such as coffee and tea and poor sleep quality.

This challenges many of the assumptions we have about caffeine consumption, but for the time being, it’s safe to say that so long as you don’t overdo it, a cup of coffee shouldn’t actually keep you from getting a good shut-eye.

For a good night’s sleep, you would be best advised to set the cigarettes aside, and maybe settle for a hot cup of tea for a nightcap and keep the pinot noir for the occasional dinner.

THIS IS ONLY FOR INFORMATION, ALWAYS CONSULT YOU PHYSICIAN BEFORE HAVING ANY PARTICULAR FOOD/ MEDICATION/EXERCISE/OTHER REMEDIES.                                    PS- THOSE INTERESTED IN RECIPES ARE FREE TO  VIEW MY BLOG-                                                                                           https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com/                                                                                                                                                FOR INFO ABOUT KNEE REPLACEMENT, YOU CAN VIEW MY BLOG-                                                  https:// kneereplacement-stickclub.blogspot.com/                                                                      FOR CROCHET DESIGNS                                                                                                    

                                https://gscrochetdesigns.blogspot.com

 

 

Better sleep ups survival period of breast cancer patients

Among the women diagnosed with advanced breast cancer, those who sleep efficiently - not necessarily for longer period - are likely to live longer than those who do not get quality sleep, a study indicated.

Sleep efficiency refers to the ratio of time asleep to time spent in bed.

"Good sleep seems to have a strongly protective effect, even with advanced breast cancer," said Oxana Palesh, an assistant professor at Stanford University.

"We were surprised by the magnitude of the relationship between sleep quality and overall survival even after we accounted for medical and psychological variables that typically predict survival," Palesh noted.

There is no association between sleep duration and survival, the findings of the research showed.

The study involved 97 women with advanced breast cancer who had a mean age of 55 years.

Objective sleep parameters were measured by wrist actigraphy for three consecutive days.

Higher sleep efficiency was significantly associated with lower mortality over the ensuing six years.

Mean survival was 68.9 months for efficient sleepers compared with 33.2 months for participants with poor sleep efficiency.
A 10 percent increase in sleep efficiency reduced the estimated hazard of subsequent mortality by 32 percent, further analysis showed.

Sleep disruption may lead to diminished immune function or impaired hormonal stress responses that are more directly responsible for the decrease in survival, the researchers indicated.
The study appeared in the journal Sleep. 

PS- THIS IS ONLY FOR INFORMATION, ALWAYS CONSULT YOU PHYSICIAN BEFORE HAVING ANY PARTICULAR FOOD/ MEDICATION/EXERCISE/OTHER REMEDIES.

PS- THOSE INTERESTED IN RECIPES ARE FREE TO VIEW MY BLOG-

HTTP:GSEASYRECIPES.BLOGSPOT.COM/

FOR INFO ABOUT KNEE REPLACEMENT, YOU CAN VIEW MY BLOG-

HTTP://KNEE REPLACEMENT-STICK CLUB.BLOGSPOT.COM/

FOR CROCHET DESIGNS

HTTP://MY CROCHET CREATIONS.BLOGSPOT.COM