Bad Sleeping Habit Linked to Lower Grades in School

Bad sleeping hygiene was found to be attributed with decreases in grade-point average in school. Although, students who have evening classes initially experience the greatest decline in grade-point average (GPA) from high school to college, as the classes of the students shift towards day time, their grades improve.

The result of the said study suggests that poor sleeping hygiene was associated with a lower grade-point average in high school. Sleep hygiene usually worsened as college days begins, and poor sleep hygiene tended to pursue through the senior year. Students whose sleep hygiene gets worst during college days present a greater risk of decline in their grade point average.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine said that sleep hygiene involves habits and behaviors that aid in a healthy sleep. Common examples of such proper sleeping habits include setting a relaxing bedtime routine and avoiding caffeine few hours before bed time.

One of the principal investigator and lead authors of the study, Jennifer Paszka, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, said that sleep hygiene is a set of voluntary behaviors which one can change.

Paszka further explained that if they are related to college performance, then the students themselves could make small changes to help them do better. Paszka said that it makes sense if students will have a good sleep to help them achieve flying colors in college.

Also, the said research found differences according to “chronotype” that presents the time of day when a person chooses to be awake. Students who have evening class means that they have natural preferences to stay up later at night, revealed greater declines in grade point average transitioning from high school to college and had a lower freshmen grade point average of 2.84 compared with daytime students with grade point average of 3.18. Said night time students shifted greater toward a daytime chronotype by the senior year of college, when there were no longer significant grade point average differences between chronotypes.

Peszka said that the said study found out that night time students were shifting their clocks during their time in college to be more like morning larks and regular robins and probably that shifting helped their academic performance improve.

Meanwhile, Peszka together with other co-authors, Peszka David Mastin, PhD from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and John Harsh from the University of Southern Mississippi studied 89 students who provided access to their high school and college academic records. Before their freshmen year of college, during summer, they accomplished a series of questionnaires about their sleep preferences, sleeping habits and the way they sleep during their high school days.

A total of thirty-four students completed the same questionnaires at the end of their first year in college and 43 participants accomplished the questionnaires after their senior year. Chronotype was determined using the Horne-Ostberg criteria.

The researchers found out that students may be able to improve their academic performance by understanding their chronotype and following sleep proper sleep hygiene recommendations.

At SLEEP 2010, Peszka, Mastin, Harsh along with other colleagues reported that poor sleeping hygiene was linked to higher scores on a measure of perceived stress among college students. It also comes with higher scores on both the exhaustion and cynicism subscales of a tool that measured “burnout”, a level of global exhaustion characterized by over fatigue, reduced job efficiency and depressed mood.

Students with bad sleeping habits are suggested to seek relief from natural sleep aids, to somehow have a complete rest, according to experts.


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Sleep Deprivation Can Trigger Sleepwalking

In a research from the Universite de Montreal, it is highly suggested that people who sleepwalk should maintain a regular bedtime to avoid unwanted strolls at night. Somnambulism which mainly affects up to four percent of adults, can bring mental confusion or attacks of amnesia in those affected individuals as they wander unresponsive to their environment.

In a recent edition of the Annals of Neurology, study authors Antonio Zadra, Mathieu Pilon and Jacques Montplaisir explained how they evaluated 40 suspected sleepwalkers. Each of the participants of the study research was referred to the Sleep Research Centre at Sacre-Coeur Hospital, a Universite de Montreal teaching hospital from August 2003 to March 2007.

The study’s lead investigator, Antonio Zadra said that sleep deprivation can trigger sleepwalking in individuals with such condition. Keeping a regular bedtime and avoiding sleep deprivation is strongly recommended for sleepwalkers if they wish to end their late night stroll.

People who participated in the said study agreed to have their standard sleep patterns monitored during a preliminary all-night assessment. During a following visit, patients were asked to stay awake all night and remained under the continuous supervision.

By the nest morning, participants were allowed to have a recovery sleep after they had been awake for 1 day and an hour. Participants were recorded through a video tape during each sleep periods as the research team assessed their behavior, such as playing with bed sheets to trying to jump over the bed rails.  Participants were assessed on a three-point scale based on the density of their actions.

Results of the study were surprising. During a standard sleep, only half of the participants exhibited some 32 behavioral episodes while during the recovery sleep, 90 percent of the patients exhibited a total of 92 behavioral episodes.

The study also revealed that sleepwalkers, previously thought to suffer from an inability to sustain slow-wave or deep sleep, had increased difficulty in passing from slow-wave sleep to another sleep stage of to be totally awake following sleep deprivation. The research likewise revealed that objective methods can now be used for investigating and diagnosing sleepwalking, said Zadra.

Sleep deprivation has a lot of consequences that might bring to an individual. However, sleep deprivation can be avoided by following proper sleeping habits. Even people who find it difficult to fall asleep can seek help from natural sleep remedies.

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Sleep Deprivation Influenced by Race, Ethnicity and Nationality

In two studies of sleep that was included at the representation at SLEEP 2012, sleep differences among American’s based on race and ethnic background were reported.

The first study was conducted by the State University of New York (SUNY) and included 400,000 participants from the National Health Interview Survey Between 2004 to 2010. The study revealed that Americans who were naturally born in the United States tend to sleep longer than the recommended seven to nine hours amount of sleep each night. Meanwhile, those Americans who were born in Africa tend to sleep less than six hours while Indian born Americans tend to sleep an six to eight hours each night.

According to the study’s lead author, Abhishek Pandey, MD, they believe that social desirability might be playing a significant role in the self-reported data. Pandey further said that inadequate sleep might be more rampant in the population than the actual self-report data, but maybe over or under-reported to project a better image of a person’s observed sleep health.

On the other hand, sleep researcher at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago observed the sleep measurements of 439 randomly selected men and women from Chicago and includes surveys regarding sleep quality and sleepiness during daytime. The study shows that white participants sleep a lot higher than the other groups while blacks have the poorest quality of sleep. The study also found out that Asian had the highest reports of sleepiness at daytime.

According to the study’s lead author and principal, Mercedes Carnethon, PhD, such racial and ethnic differences in sleep continued even following statistical adjustment for heart diseases risk factors that they have long known to be associated with poor sleep like body mass index, diabetes and high blood pressure.  Carnethon added that they have excluded participants who had history of mild to moderate sleep apnea. Therefore, the said differences in sleep are not attributable to basic sleep disorders but represent the sleep experience of a healthy subgroup of the population.

Pandey’s study also revealed that foreign-born Americans were less possibly to report short or long sleep than U.S.-born Americans following adjustments for effects of age, sex, education, income, smoking, alcohol-intake and body’s weight and emotional distress.

Researchers concluded that habitually sleeping longer or shorter than the recommended seven to nine hours for adults can be linked to several higher risks like cardiovascular disease, stroke and accidents and mental and emotional disorders. 

The study’s goals were in relation with the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Workshop on Reducing Health Disparities: The Role of Sleep Deficiency and Sleep Disorders. Its main goal is to better understand inadequate sleep, particularly across population subsets as well as to shed hope on acculturation and miscegenation.

Sleep deprivation is very common among Americans. Therefore, many of them rely on natural sleep remedies and other sleep aids.

Teen Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up After Long Sleep

The 15-year old British girl, Stacey Comeford finally woke up after a couple of months sleep. Comeford is suffering from a rare neurological disorder called Kleine Levin Syndrome.

Kleine Levin Syndrome or also known as sleeping beauty syndrome is characterized by recurring periods of period of excessive amounts of sleep. During the onset of its episode, the person affected becomes drowsy and sleeps for most of the day and night and will only wake up to eat or go to the comfort room.

Most individuals affected by the syndrome are not able to attend school or work or even care for themselves like Comeford.

Comeford actually missed nine exams and even her own birthday in the recent episode of her syndrome. She claimed that explaining her condition to other people is the hardest thing to do for her. All over the world, only about 1,000 people are affected by the said syndrome.

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), Kleine Levin Syndrome majorly affects adolescent males and can often result in a person sleeping for up to 20 hours at a time.

Unfortunately, there is no treatment or cure for the disorder. Nevertheless, as a person ages, usually he or she abandons the condition, most commonly over the course of eight to twelve years.

The NINDS further described the symptoms as episode onset always comes in a sudden, and may be associated with flu-like symptoms. The symptoms is also characterized by excessive food intake, irritability, childishness, hallucinations and an abnormally uninhibited sex drive may also be observed during an episode.

Whenever an episode is about to occur, there is never a warning. According to Comeford’s mother, there was one time when she found her daughter fast asleep on the kitchen floor. Cameford might only get up to go to the toilet or get a drink but she is not totally awake, said by the mother.

Cameford‘s smother further said that that she even investigated by the local education authority thinking that she was intentionally keeping her daughter off from school. Later on, when Comeford’s condition was diagnosed, said local education authority stopped from investigating.

Ironically, a lot of people who suffer from sleep deprivation do everything such as taking sleeping pills and other best sleeping aids just to fall asleep for several hours enough to power them up for the whole day, while people with such condition suffer from overly long sleep wishes to overcome such syndrome.

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