Teenager, High Blood Pressure and Lack of Sleep
Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, has conducted a research which concluded that sleep depravation could be the cause of high blood pressure in healthy adolescents. These associations couldn’t be explained by being overweight, socioeconomic status, sleep apnea, or known co morbidities. About 238 teenagers ages 13 to 16 were participating in this study which provided an important data about relationship between lack of sleep and high blood pressure. All of the participants of this study were without any known health issues.
This study was published in a Journal of the American Heart Organization. Young adults were observed 3 to 7 nights about the sleep duration at their homes. Special digital wrist recorder was designed in order to record a motion, sleep and wake up patterns. Special laboratory was used for one night and the blood pressure was measured nine times during that night over two days period. In the research facility, an overnight polysomnography was also made; according to Wikipedia, a polysomnography “is a multi-parametric test used in the study of sleep”, and the test outcome is termed a polysomnogram.
How Much Sleep Does Your Body Need?
You may have this idea that you’re not getting enough sleep. Chances are, you’re not. There’s a big difference on our performance when we have adequate sleep every night versus when we don’t have enough. So, how much sleep do we actually need? About some 15 years ago there was this theory that if you get about 4 to 5 hours of sleep a night then your body will just adapt and the brain can still be able to perform well. But that was because the studies conducted then were on participants who were only monitored during sleeping time at night. They were able to go home by morning. They could also have taken a nap during daytime or they could have been drinking coffee.
David Dinges who is the head of the Sleep & Chronobiology Lab in the University of Pennsylvania knows more about this than anyone else in the world. He and Hans Van Dongen who is his lead author had assigned several dozens of people into 3 groups. In 2003 these 3 groups were given the strict rule that one group sleeps for 4 hours, the other for 6 hours while the other for 8 hours for 2 weeks. Then every couple of hours at daytime they were being tested to monitor their ability for sustaining attention with PVT or psychomotor vigilance task. They were tested to see how much time their body requires to respond after they see a number flashed on the computer screen. Even just a half a second delay is already a good indication that they lack sleep and this short delay is called as microsleep.
