When Sleep Becomes An Age Old Problem

Title:
When Sleep Becomes an Age-Old Problem

Word Count:
835

Summary:
It has always been thought that sleep starts to deteriorate in late middle age and steadily erodes from then on. New findings, however, shows that sleep problems are not due to aging itself, but mostly caused by illnesses or the medications used to treat the elderly.


Keywords:
back pain, arthritis, relationship, chronic pain


Article Body:
Over the past years, only a handful tried to question the prevailing wisdom that sleep starts to deteriorate in late middle age and steadily erodes from then on. Majority of sleep researchers believe that the best way to know more about sleep problems is to ask an elderly, and you will surely get a litany of complaints.

According to Dr. Michael Vitiello, a sleep researcher who is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington, “older people complain more about their sleep. They just do.”And for years, this has been the basis of most sleep scientists who thought they knew what was going on.

Recently, however, new findings are giving experts more reasons to have second thoughts and may lead many to change their minds about sleep as they know it. It came as surprise to them that sleep does not really change much from age 60 onwards. Research shows that sleep problems are not due to aging itself, but mostly caused by illnesses or the medications used to treat the elderly.

“The more disorders older adults have, the worse they sleep,” said Sonia Ancoli-Israel, a professor of psychiatry and a sleep researcher at the University of California, San Diego. “If you look at older adults who are very healthy, they rarely have sleep problems.”

Recent studies are proving that difficulties in sleeping can be traced back to poor health. One of the most common causes of sleep disruption is pain, and a restless night can make pain worse the next day. And when pain becomes worse, it follows that sleep becomes even more difficult. The situation becomes a vicious cycle common in people with conditions that tend to afflict the elderly, like back pain and arthritis.


Two parallel lines of research have brought up this new view in sleep problems. The first tried to find out what happened to sleep patterns when healthy people grew old. The second sought to discover the relationship between sleep and pain. In order to find out what really happens with aging, Dr. Vitiello and some investigators, chose to study a group of elderly who reported no sleep problems. The group actually make up half of the people who are over 65 years old.
The group were not really spared by age-related changes in sleep. In fact, their sleep turned out to be different from sleep in young people. The group of elderly said that their sleep were lighter, more often disrupted by brief awakenings, and shorter by a half hour to an hour. The reason for these, according to Dr. Vitiello, was that the age-related changes in sleep patterns might not be an issue in themselves. Something else was making people complain about their sleep.
Another question Dr. Vitiello and his colleagues also asked was that what normally happened to sleep over the life span. It had long been known that sleep changes, but no one had systematically studied when those changes occurred or how pronounced they were in healthy people.
The results based on the analysis of 65 sleep studies, which included 3,577 healthy subjects ages 5 to 102 once again surprised the team of experts. Most of the sleep pattern changes occurred with people between the ages of 20 and 60. In comparison with teenagers and young adults, healthy middle-aged and older people slept a half hour to an hour less each night, they woke up a bit more often during the night, and their sleep was lighter. But to those who were above 60, there was no remarkable change in sleep, at least in people who were healthy.
Changes in sleep during adulthood were subtle. Middle-aged and older people, for example, would fall asleep without much difficulty. The only change in sleep latency, as it is called, came out when the investigators compared latency at the two extremes, in 20- and 80-year-olds. The 80-year-olds took an average of 10 more minutes to fall asleep.
Contrary to their expectations, the investigators did not find any increase in daytime drowsiness among healthy older people. Even aging has no effect with the time it took for people to start dreaming after they fell asleep. However, the most significant change was the number of times people woke after having fallen asleep.
According to Dr. Donald Bliwise, a sleep researcher at Emory University, healthy young adults sleep 95 percent of the night. “They fall asleep,” he said, “and don’t wake up until the alarm goes off.” Healthy people are asleep 85 percent of the night when they reach the age of 60. Their sleep is disrupted by brief wakeful moments typically lasting about three to ten seconds.
Real sleep problems arise when people have conditions that make them wake up in the night, like sleep apnea, chronic pain, restless leg syndrome or urinary problems. What to expect and what to do about it will involve studies of the relationship of sleep to pain. There is no question that pain can disrupt sleep. What's more interesting is that a lack of sleep can somehow increase the sensation of pain.

BONUS : Title:
When Your Child Is Old Enough To Be Sleeping Through The Night

Word Count:
541

Summary:
All The Sleeping Mistakes I’ve Made with My Children…

I have three children, so I’ve made pretty much every mistake known to Mommies, except the fatal ones, as luckily, all three of mine are alive and well. But the biggest mistakes I’ve made have been in my daughter’s sleeping, or lack thereof, habits. So, let me tell you my story, and hopefully you won’t be destined to make the same mistakes I have.

First, when she was very tiny, I let her fall asleep in bed with my hu...


Keywords:
Baby, babies, infant, parent, mother, child


Article Body:
All The Sleeping Mistakes I’ve Made with My Children…

I have three children, so I’ve made pretty much every mistake known to Mommies, except the fatal ones, as luckily, all three of mine are alive and well. But the biggest mistakes I’ve made have been in my daughter’s sleeping, or lack thereof, habits. So, let me tell you my story, and hopefully you won’t be destined to make the same mistakes I have.

First, when she was very tiny, I let her fall asleep in bed with my husband and me. I was nursing at first, and it was just easier to nurse her lying down and let her fall asleep. Then I would move her to her bassinet. Later in the night, when I nursed her again, sometimes I would fall asleep so quickly after nursing her, that I wouldn’t even move her back to the bassinet. She would just sleep with us for the rest of the night.

Later, when I had moved her into her crib in the nursery, I would still let her fall asleep in our bed first. I did this because I enjoyed it, it was convenient, and because she didn’t fall asleep easily in her room. And, I managed, in the process, to teach my daughter that she needed to be in the room with someone in order to fall asleep. So, guess what happened when she woke up in the middle of the night? She wanted to come back to our bed to fall asleep. And, worse, we gave in. Then we found that she was sometimes willing to go back to sleep in her bed if we gave her a cup of milk, so she began to require a cup of milk every morning at 3:00 am, long after she should have been sleeping through the night. She is now 2 ½ and only in the last month have we managed to go from 9:00 pm until 6:00am with our daughter in her own bed with no milk.

So, why didn’t I make any of these mistakes with the other children? Well, they were just different. They were sleepers, and my daughter is not. Both of my boys can fall asleep within five minutes of climbing in bed, and could sleep through and explosion. My six year old used to ask to take a nap. My daughter, on the other hand, doesn’t need as much sleep, and doesn’t sleep as soundly. So, I had more trouble getting her to sleep, and gave in to any tactic that worked. With the boys, all I had to do was put them in bed.

Now, I’ve told you this story to point out that we all make mistakes with our children, and to point out how important it is to start your child out with the right sleeping habits. I didn’t sleep through the night for almost 2 ½ years, and I have no one to blame but myself. So, take it from someone who has learned the hard way. Put your baby to sleep in her own bed, and teach her to fall asleep all by herself. You’ll be glad you did. And, you’ll be rested.