Friday, May 6, 2011

On Matters of Sleep and the Body


The human body is often cited to be a complex machine, along with several subsections that are working in conjunction with one another. As a result, it can be seen that there is some truth to the traditional Chinese medicine concept of dealing with overall balance, rather than individual symptoms. Because all the systems tend to be inevitably interconnected, after that what affects one aspect of a person's physical or mental health can also have an effect other aspects. While everyone and their grandma knows that disrupting a person's sleep patterns or a lack of sleep can have an effect on the body, new research is revealing that there might be more side effects than conventional knowledge understands.



Most people are already aware of the more immediate effects of sleep problems, such as sleeplessness. There is a noticeable decrease in alertness as well as cognitive ability, which can sometimes appear to be snowballing if the lack of sleep is actually prolonged. Sensory information can sometimes be processed reduced than normal. There are also some studies that point to incomplete temporary memory loss being an effect. The ability to control body temperature is also disrupted, with some people dropping the ability to regulate body heat altogether after prolonged periods along with disrupted or damaged sleep cycles. Significant lack of sleep has also been recognized to speed up the aging process of the skin, making a person seem older than they actually tend to be.



However, there are even much more problems for those with chronic lack of sleep or broken sleep cycles. Based on research recently completed by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Study, the metabolism of a individual may also be subject to unwanted effects of sleep deprivation. There were profound differences in the actual metabolic rates of the people who were subjected to controlled levels of sleep deprivation. The results showed that glucose tolerance, among the key indicators used to determine whether someone offers diabetes, changed. Instead of showing a normal glucose tolerance for their grow older, the sleep miserable test subjects exhibited the tolerance of someone in the early stages of diabetes. The results appear to indicate that the system's ability to metabolize glucose is actually hampered by sleep debt.



The results claim that sleep deprivation may play a role within the onset of diabetes, as well as being considered as a potential factor in the statistic rise of people with diabetes in developed countries. Other effects the study noted incorporated hypertension, more rapid aging of skin tissue, a decreased metabolic rate (which might lead to obesity), and various memory-related issues. The study was conducted only on the short-term basis (for this type of research), lasting only 16 days. It is speculated that the recorded effects can only worsen if the sleep deprivation time period was prolonged.



It is notable that, in contrast to studies that have come before it, these studies team was not interested in the cognitive results. There has always been conjecture on the concrete physical effects of a lack of sleep on the body, but there has never been a study dedicated solely in order to pursuing what those effects are. The study is actually considered instead timely, mainly because the majority of the working population spends less than the suggested eight hours associated with sleep. While the difference of eight hours to the average sleep time of five hrs may not seem which significant, the results emerged from test topics who were subjected to simply five hours associated with sleep per 24-hour time period.



Article Source: articlemotron . com


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