SLEEP DEPRIVATION IS HURTING OUR ECONOMY

RAND Europe, a non-profit organization, realized what most of us know intrinsically—bad sleep habits have a negative impact on work performance — but researchers wanted to quantify the effects. They found that a person who, on average, sleeps less than 6 hours a night has a 13 percent higher risk of mortality than a counterpart sleeping 7 to 9 hours a night.

On top of that, they found that the United States was the global leader in economic losses from bad sleep habits, losing approximately 2.92 percent of its total GDP due to sleep deprivation. That’s a whopping $411 billion of lost productivity, or approximately 1.2 million working days per year.

Read More Here

The post Why Lack of Sleep Is Costing Us Billions of Dollars first appeared on Academy Sleep Wellness.

The post Why Lack of Sleep Is Costing Us Billions of Dollars appeared first on Academy Sleep Wellness.

Laurence Fardet, MD, PhD, of the Universite Paris Est Creteil, France and colleagues used data from a UK primary care database and included adults who received new quinine salt (sulfate, bisulfate, dihydrochloride) prescriptions for idiopathic (unknown cause) muscular cramps or restless leg syndrome for at least one year from January 1990 to December 2014 at an average dosage of 100 mg/d or more (exposed group).

Read More Here

The post Long-Term Use of Quinine for Restless Legs Syndrome Linked with Increased Risk of Death first appeared on Academy Sleep Wellness.

The post Long-Term Use of Quinine for Restless Legs Syndrome Linked with Increased Risk of Death appeared first on Academy Sleep Wellness.

And she’s not alone. Various studies indicate that chronically sleepy and stressed-out teenagers might be the new normal among U.S. adolescents who are competing for grades, colleges and, eventually, jobs.

Studies have shown teenagers actually need between nine and 10 hours of sleep a night. But the vast majority (69 percent) aren’t getting it.

Enter “napping pods.” They’re essentially egg-shaped lounge chairs that recline, with a circular lid that can be pulled over the chest to shield against light.

“It just sort of envelops you in a really nice darkness, with soft lighting behind you,” says Vanderkooy, a frequent user of the pods. She says she typically gets only four to five hours of sleep a night.

Read More Here

The post Stressed-Out High Schoolers Advised To Try A Nap Pod first appeared on Academy Sleep Wellness.

The post Stressed-Out High Schoolers Advised To Try A Nap Pod appeared first on Academy Sleep Wellness.

However, although sleep disturbances are often linked to various other diseases, they are not merely components of a larger condition, according to Larry Culpepper, MD, MPH professor in the department of family medicine at Boston University and a member of the Education Committee for the National Sleep Foundation.

“In the clinical setting, a misconception that’s still fairly frequent is that insomnia is just an almost to-be-expected part of medical and psychiatric conditions,” Culpepper told Healio Family Medicine. “That’s actually not the case. That was the major point that’s imbedded in the change from older diagnostic criteria and the new DSM-5 criteria for insomnia. In the past, we used to diagnose insomnia as either primary or secondary. Now, we’re recognizing that this is not helpful to patients. Insomnia is simply insomnia, and it stands on its own.”

Read More Here

The post Sleep Disturbances an Important Health Concern that Should Be Addressed in Primary Care first appeared on Academy Sleep Wellness.

The post Sleep Disturbances an Important Health Concern that Should Be Addressed in Primary Care appeared first on Academy Sleep Wellness.