Doctors Orders

Some American workplaces are embracing the concept of an afternoon siesta, but plan carefully to wake well rested and feel more productive.

Ready for a midday snooze? Don’t feel guilty about it. Napping may just be the answer to a more productive workday.

More companies in the United States are starting to offer on-the-job sleep options for employees, ranging from special napping rooms to expensive sleep pods. Progressive, well-known companies like Google, Zappos, and Ben & Jerry’s are “nap friendly.” Yet can ...

Primary hypersomnia is defined by excessive daytime sleepiness in the absence of known causes of sleepiness.

An abnormal protein in cerebrospinal fluid appears to cause hypersomnia, a form of excessive daytime sleepiness, and an off-the-shelf drug effectively treated it, researchers said.

Extracted from patients with primary hypersomnia, the elusive substance, which was not fully isolated in the study, enhanced the sensitivity of subtype A gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) receptors, reported David Rye, MD, PhD, of Emory University in Atlanta, and colleagues.

Moreover, seven patients ...

Weight loss, particularly abdominal fat loss, improves sleep quality in people who are overweight or obese, new research finds.

Losing weight — through diet alone or diet and exercise combined — might be the ticket to sounder sleep in people who are overweight or obese, researchers from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine report at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in Los Angeles.

A loss of belly fat in particular was associated with better sleep quality in the study’s 77 participants, ...

A gene that regulates sleep and circadian rhythm may also be linked to aging, according to a new study, which may explain the increased risk for diseases that accompany poor sleep habits.

A lack of sleep can contribute to a host of negative health effects, and researchers say they now understand why. Working in mice, researchers found that a gene called SIRT1, which regulates circadian rhythm and sleep, is also linked to aging, according to a study published today in the ...

What is actually going on inside of our bodies when we dream?

Imagine this: You’re having a vivid dream of something chasing you. You run and leap across buildings, jumping and spinning.

What keeps your body from actually acting out these movements during REM sleep, even as they play out so actively in your brain?

Scientists have pinpointed the mechanism that keeps our muscles paralyzed, and they say that understanding could be a boon to finding treatments for sleep conditions and disorders ...

Study findings could have implications for jobs that require rotating shift work, researchers say.

Severe sleep deprivation has the same effect on the immune system as physical stress, according to a new study.

Researchers in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom found sleep loss triggers the production of white blood cells, known as granulocytes, particularly at night.

“The granulocytes reacted immediately to the physical stress of sleep loss and directly mirrored the body’s stress response,” explained the study’s lead author, Katrin Ackermann, a ...

Study showed that when sleep was disrupted, even for a few seconds, heart rates increased.

Nighttime noise in hospitals adds up to poor sleep, which may hurt healing when patients need it most, researchers found.

In a laboratory sleep study, recorded hospital sounds of overhead paging, IV alarms, squeaky carts, and the like disrupted sleep and raised heart rates, Orfeu M. Buxton, PhD, of Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and colleagues reported.

Electronic alert sounds like ringing phones and IV ...

Researchers warn against chronic use, but one expert said underlying health woes could also be a factor.

Prescription sleeping pills may help you get some much needed rest at night, but using them routinely might also make it more likely that you will die or develop certain types of cancer, research suggests.

A new study suggests that those who take these medications are four times more likely to die than people who don’t take them. What’s more, the research shows that sleeping ...

Yawning helps keep the brain cool, and the sinuses play a role in that process by acting as bellows, a new report suggests.

Yawning isn’t triggered because you’re bored, tired or need oxygen. Rather, yawning helps regulate the brain’s temperature, according to Gary Hack, of the University of Maryland School of Dentistry, and Andrew Gallup, of Princeton University.

“The brain is exquisitely sensitive to temperature changes and therefore must be protected from overheating,” they said in a University of Maryland news release. ...

Diabetes is one of the most serious health problems in the United States and around the world. According to Centers for Disease Control estimates, 1 in 10 American adults currently has diabetes. And, if the CDC projections are correct, those numbers will double or even triple over the next 40 years.

There are well-established links between disrupted sleep and risk of type 2 diabetes. But the exact relationship between the two is not fully understood. In the ongoing effort to better ...