https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/25001-fatal-f...
> The cause of death for people diagnosed with fatal familial insomnia is damage to the brain and nervous system. This damage, caused by prion proteins accumulating in the thalamus, creates symptoms of insomnia and mental deterioration.
What's interesting to me is how many animals beyond humans do it - so it's not purely tied to the human cognitive functions like higher order thinking etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep
https://us.whales.org/whales-dolphins/how-do-dolphins-sleep/
I have a friend that will just sleep through multiple alarms. But he can also just fall asleep in 10 minutes on an airplane and I can't sleep at all on a plane. He also takes lots of naps and I never take a nap unless I'm sick.
The worst feeling to me is waking up from some external noise. I just feel so groggy afterword. My body will feel better after 5 hours of sleep and I just wake up naturally compared to 5 hours, go back to sleep for 2 hours, and get woken up during the wrong time (middle of REM cycle?) and then I feel tired for the whole day even though I got more sleep.
>while the new Inspire 2 gives insights into sleep stages, the Smart Wake feature is absent. We’re not sure why this is. Hopefully it will come via a software update.
Quick edit, I guess the name changed slightly: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...
Anecdotal, but I think that sleep depth might have something to do with it.
The question is whether it still matters in the modern era.
I wish culturally it was standard for houses to have something like `sleep` rooms that are optimized for that purpose.
It's very funny how people conflate that with other aspects of couples relationships.
Is that actually the case? do we have long term data on these people? or are we just going off of "I feel fine on 5 hours of sleep" stories? Or are you only referring to day to day health effects?
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene-id...
There are no known health problems caused by this syndrome, according to a Cleveland Clinic overview page: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/short-sleeper...
Presumably they mean there's no evidence of this syndrome causing health issues (presumably the "known" part is redundant). Trying to position a causal hypothesis as a matter-of-fact-finding is crazy.
EDIT: that article is insanely poorly written and even worse cited. How are these websites giving super-sketchy medical advice even legal. There's no author to hold accountable, no way to remediate the quality of the article, no sources cited, and it's making statements that wouldn't hold up in a court of law.
This is a causal hypothesis framed as a statement. The rhetorics indicate an authoritative statement of fact regarding what the syndrome does cause, which is fundamentally an impossible conclusion to draw empirically.
The only hedge in the sentence is "known", which is tautological.
Of course, it's impossible to eliminate all variables, making authoritative claims about lack of causal relation impossible. But at least they could make the effort to frame this uncertainty in reasonable terms.
> What would the causal hypothesis be, "this syndrome causes no diseases"?
EDIT: but c'mon, just read the article. It's extremely bold in its claims with no evidence. "If you have short sleeper syndrome, you don’t need as much sleep as others. You can expect this to continue throughout your life." "Natural short sleepers don’t experience the same health risks as people who don’t get enough sleep." etc. I don't see any semantic difference between this and "this syndrome causes no known diseases". (or "SSS doesn’t pose any known health risks." as the actual quotation states.)
People who accomplish a great deal are often one of these "short sleepers" who can subsist on 5 or even 4 hours of sleep a night; think top-of-their-field salesmen, CEOs, and so on. They simply have more time to get things done, and don't have the problem longer sleepers do that getting 4-5 hours on a regular basis would start to affect their performance in every area of life, not to mention their health.
(as an aside: have CPAP, apnea is not a factor.)
I wonder if there was an increase in dementia-related disorders once lightbulbs kept people up longer.
I honestly believe that this is not "natural", but rather an adaptation to the absurdly long European winter nights. Note that we didn't evolve there, so it seems unlikely that bi-phasic sleep is the most primal way.
Seems reasonable to expect some degree of genetic drift in sleep regulation as well, but I know of no data on this.
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/410051/scientists-discover...
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9499244/
I am incapable of sleeping more than about 5.5 hours (unless I'm severely sleep deprived). So to me it seems likely that FNSS (familial natural short sleep) is a thing, but more research is needed I guess.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Sleep/Matthew-...
That should tell us it's something incredibly important that's hard to do any other way.
Edit: on the other hand... if Earth had two suns and rarely had periods of darkness, you wonder if maybe there would have been more evolutionary pressure to find another way.
It's easy to think of sleep as a compromise to be defeated because we're culturally preoccupied with the achievements and pleasures of wakefulness, but that's really just us claiming personal preference for one narrow part of a holistic system that's just doing its own survival and propagation thing.
Consider trees, mushrooms, cicadas, snakes, or cats. Chilling out in low power mode as much is possible is maybe not a error to be fixed so much as it is an outcome of efficient design.
Which doesn't mean that's the only thing sleep is good for, evolution doesn't believe in separating concerns, but it's definitely a thing it does.
The default and optimal state of a life form is waiting and efficiently using resources.
Moving around, socializing and reproducing, killing and eating, are all energy expenditures or necessary to be able to prolong the sleep-life. Annoyances, from the POV of the sleep-being.
Nature developed over millions of years of trial and error.
Cats sleep during the day without any issues. So the amount of light seems to not matter.
By the way I wonder do their ear sleep or not because they still wake up easily if there is some suspicious sound.
I joined a Stanford study and had a spinal tap sample submitted for testing - in theory I am "unlikely" to develop anything for the next 20 years - but that only gets me to my late 60's :(
[x] Sleep apnea
[x] Digestive issues
[x] Former psychonaut
[x] Highly stressed pretty much always due to work
I can only hope that whatever brand of dementia I end up with is something akin to Mr Toad's Wild Ride, or whatever. I'd be happy just to go out either laughing or well-rested.
You know the plot of that ride, right?
Reasons to be wary of this research, including:
-The rodent-to-human study element
-causation v correlation
-sample size
Reasons to take this research seriously:
-Probiotic supplements are relatively new and long term effects aren’t understood.
-The “health as a business” realities that are very much at work here.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277257232...
https://news.gsu.edu/2018/10/18/adding-refined-fiber-to-proc...
Culturelle contains inulin. That's the brand that takes up most of the space at my local CVS and Walgreens. Also the CVS-brand knockoff contains inulin.
From the case study in the GP
>The only noted lifestyle change between colonoscopies was the initiation of 4 grams of agave inulin powder daily in his morning beverage for the last 2 years of that seven-year period.
At least it's easy to get a home sleep apnea test and an APAP/CPAP these days.
The latter is quite painful.
Showing me how to use the machine
Showing me how to wear the mask
Configuring the machine with anything other than the default settings
A new machine with the default settings is a nightmare. The apap algorithm will spike your pressure up to 16 (which is too high for most people) one minute and drop down to 4 (which is too low for most) the next. At the high end is aerophagia and leaks, at the low end, your apnea events will still happen.
When I called my doctor and explained the machine made my sleep worse, her office said “we gave you a machine. It’s out of our hands. Would you like us to refer you to a psychologist? The problem must be in your head.” This is almost verbatim.
The equipment supplier wasn’t much better. They offered to do a “mask fitting” but it was mid 2021 and the woman didn’t even want to be in the same room as me for fear of covid.
So what should they have done? I dunno. Eventually a friend recommended a mask that worked for me. I learned to analyze the data reported by the machine and changed the settings myself to something that worked for me. It took a year, the worst year of my life. Tired and constantly waking up. Thank god for YouTube and OSCAR. knowing what I know now, I can (and have) help someone else do this process in a week or two, but I had nobody to even ask.
No, they don't. At least not on a Resmed machine. You just have to enter a special mode to change them. On my machine that's holding down 2 buttons for a couple of seconds.
> if you make an appointment you can talk over the problems and get them to adjust the pressure or whatever.
I'm glad you had a Dr that did this for you. It is not the universal experience, and it definitely wasn't mine.
I have SA and a history of "mild" nightmares going back decades. Nothing terrifying, but very uncomfortable such as snakes hiding everywhere, and recently other animals such as tigers. I can't prove it, but I believe these are subconscious efforts by your brain to scare you into breathing.
If one wants to rule out sleep apean (being not the best sleeper) but probably doesn't have it (but other causes like stress) but at least want to measure it somewhat, how could one test that oneself with at least some probability?
Lots of things that are called "at home test" seem to involve getting special equipment and sending stuff to a lab anyway, that still involves a physician, some visitations with them etc... anyway.
Is there anything at all that one can do on their own to have at least some idea of the chances of having sleep apnea or not that does not involve a professional? Even if to then consider a professional if there are some indications? E.g. from an all-night audio recording, any indication of sounds that are yes or not sleep apnea indicating? And heartbeat/oxygen etc... measured by a watch?
Or is sleep apnea such a subtle and hard-to-detect issue that it's really impossible to self diagnose, it's such a subtle thing that only specialized equipment and specialists can do it, and trying to measure anything yourself gives no more answer than a 50/50 random chance coin toss?
Otherwise you can look at questionnaires that ask things like whether you wake up a lot at night or snore, etc.
That said... it's pretty easy to just get a device that they give you that you connect to your phone to log data for a night. And they know what they're doing when they interpret it. So I would recommend that, since it's really easy to just go to a place and get a device and do a test.
This isn't like it used to be where you'd have to sleep in some strange place.
https://www.news18.com/amp/buzz/meet-80-year-old-vietnamese-...
Google it. There’s a lot about him. It’s like the one thing that makes zero sense in all this research about sleep.
I feel refreshed in the morning. Strange.
Our science is fairly reductionist. Nature is incorporating vast amounts of science, most of which we probably don't even know about yet.
You should alternate cardio and weight lifting for general health, not just for sleep. The weight training helps with muscle/bone loss as you age
When I play in really hard, grueling sessions, taking CBD also helps reduce the inflammation in my body and helps me sleep deeper. I also stretch for at least 30-40 mins when I get done which also helps.
So it makes sense, once you stop or change your body's cycle, it can affect a lot of other areas of your day-to-day schedule.
Running is great too. But be careful of doing it too much. Overtraining can break down your immune system and make you more susceptible to disease.
A sustained walk maximizes digestion and subconscious problem-solving benefits. Short bursts, especially w/ kids involved, maximizes spiritual fulfillment.
Both are probably great for metabolic health.
(Even before that, I didn't sleep particularly well. Yes, when I visit a friend in the countryside, where it's really dark and quiet, I sleep better. Perhaps I should look into blackout shades!)
I used to bike a lot, stopped after a leg/back injury (not from biking), but I picked up an eBike about 3 years ago and absolutely love it. The pedal assist takes enough stress off my leg that I can keep it on the lowest setting and ride for hours, which feels really, really good and does actually help with sleep that night. This, of course, is weather/season dependent but I relish the times when I can just hop on after work and go somewhere.
I mostly do distance running though - shorter interval training or sprints kills me and probably also is better for sleep. Or I'm just less used to it
Weightlifting on the other hand... a solid hour of going heavy will put me out like a baby every time.
I'm very curious why. Am I just built for long distance running and NOT for building muscle?
Until I got my apnea treated, I never slept well. I had not had a really good night's sleep in years, and I hadn't had a great night's sleep as an adult probably ever. In school - decades ago - I fell asleep in class regularly and napped every day. Despite this, I have been successful, but I can't help but wonder who I'd be if I hadn't had that problem. What's worse, because you do not actually sleep, whatever happens during sleep that repairs your body doesn't really happen. Sleep apnea massively increases your risk for heart disease, stroke, and many other serious conditions.
Sleep apnea is treated with CPAP - continuous positive airway pressure - from a machine that sits on your bedside. You wear a mask like Bane and it forces air into your throat and opens it, making it easier to breathe. CPAP is not a cure, because it doesn't fix the underlying anatomical issue, but properly calibrated it results in complete remission. I now sleep normally. From a sleep perspective, I feel amazing, better than I have in years. For the first time in my life, I can rely on feeling good in the morning if I get enough hours of sleep in. Even four hours on the CPAP is better than eight or nine hours without it. (Also, over time, your brain becomes conditioned that CPAP = sleep, and you zonk out within minutes of putting it on.)
It is costly and time consuming, yes, and CPAP machines are a huge lifestyle adjustment. But good lord, is it worth it. I have never felt or slept better. In the years since my diagnosis I have not slept a single night without my CPAP and I don't think I ever will again, unless some magical cure comes out.
If you have struggled with insomnia, snoring, or feeling wakeful after sleep, I beg you to get a sleep study and look into whether apnea, or another similar condition, could be the cause.
My Apple Watch has an oximeter (I bought it before that feature was pulled in the US), and there's a "sleep apnea notifications" section in the "Health" app, but I'm not sure if the absence of notifications implies an absence of a problem.
Would sleep apnea always be visible as a lower blood oxygen level when sleeping, or can there be negative effects even without that?
> Would sleep apnea always be visible as a lower blood oxygen level when sleeping, or can there be negative effects even without that?
It would not always be visible, no, if your AHI was low enough. It is still damaging even if your blood oxygen is okay, because you are waking up to keep it that way. You're not getting enough sleep as a result.
You might try the recording trick I mentioned below to listen for sounds of it, but if you're unsure at all, I'd consider seeing a sleep doc.
If you're concerned with Sleep apnea testing is very easy these days. You goto a sleep specialist, they give you a little kit you take home, you put it on for one night, they look at the data. Done! It's not like even a decade or so ago where it's "goto sleep lab", most of it's done at home now for the initial investigation.
Ringconn, similar to Oura without the compulsory subscription, claims to be able to detect sleep apnea with 90.7% accuracy. see https://ringconn.com/blogs/news/understanding-sleep-apnea-an...
I can't give medical advice, but: Record yourself on your phone overnight and listen back. If you hear loud snoring with gaps or pauses in between, and especially any sort of choking, gasping, or coughing sound, and you don't remember doing it... definitely look into it further.
My suggestion is an elevated sleep position by increasing your head position with two stacked pillows or raising the head of the bed. It mechanically helps sleep apnea. It got me from a high Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI) score to a very low one with the cpap.
The Apple Watch has not shown an ability to identify sleep disturbances or sleep apnea when it should according to my cpap AHI score and when napping/sleeping without a cpap.
Blood oxygen measurements are basically useless from my research unless you need oxygen because you are so sick you cannot walk short distances. Everyone seems to have a different % they function well at asleep or awake. I have also used a much more accurate and faster reading device than the Apple Watch.
And this repeats all night long.
The vast majority of cases of sleep apnea can be cured with weight loss, exercise, nasal breathing exercises..
Studies show that non-overweight or obese people with sleep apnea are extremely common and make up between 20 and 40% of all apnea sufferers:
1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5181619/
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41440-024-01669-9
3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9130173/#:~:text=Ap...
4. https://ejo.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43163-024-006...
5. https://home.liebertpub.com/publications/respiratory-care/68...
"Nasal breathing exercises" cannot overcome physiology and cannot help you if you are sleeping and have no conscious control over your muscles. Apnea is caused by physiology and while it can be made worse by weight, weight loss alone does not fix it. It may bring some people's apneas down to an acceptable level, but that is not the case for all or even most patients.
Your advice is roughly the same as telling people to skip their flu or COVID shots and hope their diet and exercise keeps them from getting sick. It's not that diet and exercise are bad for you, but they aren't the same as an exact treatment for the problem you have.
Such a drug would undermine things as they stand and so institutional self-preservation is now the primary purpose trumping any sort of too good actual solution.
You will learn more operating orthogonal to such a corrupt anti-inquiry, science-theatre. Just as a doctor-spouse (an unpaid friend-consultant) will always give you better advice than a paid doctor.
...Im saying if you are willing to read the research you are probably willing to run some n-of-1 quasi experiments.
For example dont use a computer, TV or phone for a month. Don't sit under LED or Fluroescent Lights for a month...I dont know, just try dumb things and you will learn faster than professionals "games".
This is because we operate in a low bar expectation brought on by arrogance of theory over experiment.
When crowd sourced n-of-1 combinatorial design apps drop for patients and scale to large enough, ... this point will make sense
I'm here saying: "this treatment massively improved my life and might have actually saved it!" and your response is "this shows medicine is wholly corrupt and cannot be trusted."
It's especially odd given that CPAP is a non-invasive low-to-no-side-effect solution whose only real drawback is that the machines are expensive and hard to calibrate, and don't work if you don't use them. We're not talking about a new drug or vaccine or something. We're literally just talking about helping people breathe easier. And it's not like I am using the CPAP blindly with no idea whether it's working. I can literally tell every day just by existing in a rested state that it is working.
I'm not saying there isn't some theoretical better treatment out there. But it seems like you think I should... not use the treatment I have because the people who produced it might be corrupt?
I genuinely don't see how these things follow or are even related.
And for what it's worth, I do have a doctor-spouse, and she demanded I get a CPAP and is happy every day that I have one.
> "...If a hypothetical drug existed that was radically cheap and improved general health outcomes by 25%-50%, the institution of medicine and insurance by logic of self-preservation would not allow to exist or be known."
The reasoning is that there is a large capacity and infrastructure of trained professionals and insurance expectational-warp. If the medical visits and drug prescriptions were decimated the financial side of things would collapse. The reason they turn a blind eye to what we think of as truth-oriented science is that early career professionals have mortgages and debt and so are themselves locked-in to playing their cards in favor of institutional self-preservation. When this gets out of hand they begin to habitualize a rationalization-like thinking that is purely self-serving.
I am of the opinion that we are far past the point of corruption (it is unconscious in the professionals themselves), but it is mostly a question of debt thresholds and group psychology.
My reasons for saying you should yourself as a sleep apnea patient should just figure it out is that that is how pessimistic I am about such professional blindness. To be honest I'm leaving out the main problem with CPAP because by your response you just aren't ready to engage in creative thought (no offense that is almost all of humanity). Most of the intellectual and professional world sets a bar so damn low its like they are playing limbo. Meanwhile patients are like zombified robots programmed to trust the white lab coats like lambs to the slaughter.
Just like political debate is self-perpetuating such that a negatively defined identity is preserved and valued over mediation and understanding, most professionals use their brain power to self-sabotage away from institutional-skeptical inquiry as its too uncomfortable to self-sacrifice reputation, income and eventually their careers.
CPAP is a life-saver for sure, but treating your underlying causes of apnea can often help as well.
Its not magic, its that modern professionalized science is devoid of inquiry.
I could solve the issue with perhaps 1000-5000 serious patient-subjects, a small amount of funding and a friggen smart phone app.
Also a non-corrupt government should seem to want to lower healthcare costs. But just because politicians say that doesn't mean much because the incentives of government too are poisoned. They don't in practice (and in sum) want to lower healthcare costs. Why would you think that?
It's self-sacrifice that is needed. Most medicine will collapse in my lifetime, and the professionals, politicians and lobbyists brought this upon themselves (and unfortunately us).
"After just one day of restricting sleep in mice, Rogulja could see fats in the animals’ intestines that weren’t entering circulation. After five days, their guts were filled with fat although their bodies were starved of nutrients."
This is interesting. People with Autism and ADHD often have gut issues and problems with dopamine etc. Maybe these deceases are caused by constant sleep deprivation.
They point to one small study in 7 participants, but slow-wave enhancement (increasing slow-wave delta power) has over a decade of research, including 4 recent papers in older adults looking at Alzheimer's both as a preventative measure and as management of symptoms (we can't say treatment yet, that's still many studies away).
We provide our technology to researchers, and are preparing our consumer product.
You can find more on our website, as well as links to a few of the more relevant studies at https://affectablesleep.com
How I describe the technology is that slow-wave activity is the synchronous firing of neurons, the hallmark and defining feature of deep sleep. We can't create slow-waves, but we can increase the electrical activity, increase the synchronous firing of neurons, which is like giving the glymphatic system an extra boost of power. This enhances the restorative function of the brain, without altering sleep time.
I should be completing our whitepaper which provides a more in depth look at the technology, the state of sleep, and a large chronological list of how the research has progressed over the last decade.
sylware•1w ago
Nature may give us some hints to improve "AI" reliability.
parpfish•1w ago
moate•1w ago
parpfish•1w ago
bregma•1w ago
disgruntledphd2•1w ago
LPisGood•1w ago
astrange•1w ago
HarHarVeryFunny•1w ago
alan-crowe•1w ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43612517
nottorp•1w ago
Like "understanding" and "thinking"?
Or "will change everything"?