The Sleep Quality Of Insomnia Patients Can Be Improved By Moderate Exercise

An acute session of moderate aerobic exercise, but not heavy aerobic or moderate strength exercises, can reduce the anxiety state and improve the sleep quality of insomnia patients, according to a research abstract presented at SLEEP 2008, the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS).
The study, authored by Giselle S. Passos, of Federal University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, focused on 36 patients (eight men and 28 women) with primary chronic insomnia, who were divided into three experimental groups (moderate aerobic exercise, heavy aerobic exercise, and moderate strength exercise) and a control group.
According to the results, after the exercise session, reductions were shown in sleep onset latency (54 percent) and wake time (36 percent) in the moderate aerobic exercise group, while increases were shown in total sleep time (21 percent) and in sleep efficiency (18 percent). A significant increase in the total sleep time (37 percent) and reduction in the sleep onset latency (40 percent) were observed in the sleep log of volunteers of the moderate aerobic exercise group. Finally, a significant reduction (seven percent) in the anxiety state was also observed after moderate aerobic exercise session.
"These findings indicate that there is a way to diminish the symptoms of insomnia without using medication," said Passos. "This study is the first to look at the importance of using physical exercise to treat insomnia, and may contribute to increased quality of life in people with one of the most important kind of sleep disorders around the world."
Insomnia is a classification of sleep disorders in which a person has trouble falling asleep, staying asleep or waking up too early. It is the most commonly reported sleep disorder. About 30 percent of adults have symptoms of insomnia. It is more common among elderly people and women.
It is recommended that adults get between seven and eight hours of nightly sleep.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) offers the following tips on how to get a good night’s sleep:
Follow a consistent bedtime routine.
generic viagra online buy Establish a relaxing setting at bedtime.
Get a full night’s sleep every night.
Avoid foods or drinks that contain caffeine, as well as any medicine that has a stimulant, prior to bedtime.
Do not bring your worries to bed with you.
Do not go to bed hungry, but don’t eat a big meal before bedtime either.
Avoid any rigorous exercise within six hours of your bedtime.
Make your bedroom quiet, dark and a little bit cool.
Get up at the same time every morning.
Those who suspect that they might be suffering from insomnia, or another sleep disorder, are encouraged to consult with their primary care physician or a sleep specialist.
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Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
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More information about insomnia is available from the AASM at http://www.sleepeducation.com/Disorder.aspx?id=6.
The annual SLEEP meeting brings together an international body of 5,000 leading researchers and clinicians in the field of sleep medicine to present and discuss new findings and medical developments related to sleep and sleep disorders.
More than 1,000 research abstracts will be presented at the SLEEP meeting, a joint venture of the AASM and the Sleep Research Society. The three-and-a-half-day scientific meeting will bring to light new findings that enhance the understanding of the processes of sleep and aid the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders such as insomnia, narcolepsy and sleep apnea.
SleepEducation.com, a patient education Web site created by the AASM, provides information about various sleep disorders, the forms of treatment available, recent news on the topic of sleep, sleep studies that have been conducted and a listing of sleep facilities.
Source: Kathleen McCann
American Academy of Sleep Medicine
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Relationship Between Personality Constructs And Different Anxiety Types Among Chinese And Caucasian College Students

This study investigates the relationship between personality constructs and different anxiety types among Chinese and Caucasian college students, and found that socially-prescribed perfectionism appeared to be a more accurate predictor of anxiety for the Chinese group as compared to their Caucasian counterparts.
Buy generic levitra For the individualistic Caucasian culture - which prescribes high expectations to personal achievement, perfectionism has more impact on trait anxiety.
The authors believe that these findings can improve multicultural counseling by providing more culturally specific interventions for anxiety disorders.
"Culture-specific personality correlates of anxiety among Chinese and Caucasian college students"
Dong XIE, Frederick T. L. LEONG, and Shoudong FENG
Click here to see abstract online
The Asian Journal of Social Psychology stimulates research and encourages academic exchanges for the advancement of social psychology in Asia. It publishes theoretical and empirical papers, as well as book reviews by Asian scholars and those interested in Asian cultures and societies.
Coverage includes all aspects of social processes such as development, cognition, personality, health, counselling, organisation and education. The journal encourages interdisciplinary integration with social sciences and humanities.
Asian Journal of Social Psychology
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Reported Cases Of PTSD In Soldiers Up 50% In 2007, According To Defense Officials

The number of U.S. service members diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder increased by nearly 50% from 2006 to 2007, according to Pentagon data released on Tuesday, the Washington Post reports. Nearly 40,000 soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan from 2003 to 2007 have been diagnosed by the military as having PTSD (Scott Tyson, Washington Post, 5/28). In 2007, nearly 14,000 cases of PTSD were diagnosed by military officials, compared with more than 9,500 new cases in 2006 and 1,632 in 2003, Army data show (Jelinek, AP/New York Times, 5/28).
Buy generic acomplia According to data from the Office of the Army Surgeon General, a total of 28,365 Army soldiers have been diagnosed with PTSD, including more than 10,000 in 2007 (Washington Post, 5/28). In 2006, more than 6,800 new cases of PTSD among Army soldiers were reported (Jelinek, AP/San Francisco Chronicle, 5/28). There are a total of 5,581 PTSD cases among Marine Corps service members, including 2,114 in 2007 (Washington Post, 5/28). In 2006, 1,366 new cases of PTSD among Marines were diagnosed (AP/San Francisco Chronicle, 5/28). Cases of PTSD among Air Force and Navy soldiers did not exceed 1,000 in 2007.
According to Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, up to 30% of deployed soldiers experience PTSD symptoms (Washington Post, 5/28). This is the first time Department of Defense officials have released PTSD data on soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. Officials previously have said that up to 20% of soldiers showed symptoms of mental health problems. Schoomaker attributed the surge in reported cases to the 2004 launch of an electronic record system by officials, increased knowledge about PTSD, increased violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, an increase in the number of deployed troops, increased exposure of troops to combat, and longer lengths of and multiple deployments (AP/New York Times, 5/28).
Military officials said that the numbers represent a fraction of service members who have PTSD because the data do not include those diagnosed by Department of Veterans Affairs workers or civilian caregivers, and those who do not seek care, according to the Post (Washington Post, 5/28). According to the AP/San Francisco Chronicle, "Officials have estimated that roughly 50% of troops with mental health problems don’t get treatment because they’re embarrassed or fear it will hurt their careers" (AP/San Francisco Chronicle, 5/28). Schoomaker said, "We’re in our infancy right now of fully knowing what the extent of this is" (Washington Post, 5/28).
Broadcast Coverage
NPR’s "Talk of the Nation" on Tuesday included a discussion with Sue Halpern, who wrote about an immersion therapy video game developed by psychologist Albert "Skip" Rizzo that simulates the sights, sounds and smells of combat and allows a patient to re-enter a traumatic situation gradually. The game, called "Virtual Iraq," is intended for psychologists treating veterans struggling with PTSD (Conan, "Talk of the Nation," NPR, 5/27).
Reprinted with kind permission from You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
© 2008 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.
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Multicellular Response Is ‘All For One’

Real or perceived threats can trigger the well-known "fight or flight response" in humans and other animals. Adrenaline flows, and the stressed individual’s heart pumps faster, the muscles work harder, the brain sharpens and non-essential systems shut down. The whole organism responds in concert in order to survive.
At the molecular level, it has been widely assumed that, in single-celled organisms, each cell perceives its environment — and responds to stress conditions — individually, each on its own to protect itself. Likewise, it had been thought that cells in multicellular organisms respond the same way, but a new study by scientists at Northwestern University reports otherwise.
The Northwestern researchers demonstrated something very unexpected in their studies of the worm C. elegans: Authority is taken away from individual cells and given to two specialized neurons to sense temperature stress and organize an integrated molecular response for the entire organism.
The study, with results that show a possible parallel with the orchestrated "fight or flight response," is published in the May 9 issue of the journal Science.
"This was surprising — that two neurons control the response of the 957 other cells in C. elegans," said Richard I. Morimoto, Bill and Gayle Cook Professor of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Cell Biology in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He led the research team.
"It is well established that single cells respond to physiological stress on their own, cell by cell. Now we’ve shown this is not the case when individual cells become organized to form a multicellular organism. Now it is all for one — an integrated system where the cells and tissues only respond to stress when the neuronal signal says to respond as an organism."
The findings have implications for new ways of thinking about diseases that affect the stress pathways, says Morimoto. Neurons that sense the environment govern such important pathways as stress response and molecular chaperones, which play a significant role in aging and neurodegenerative diseases.
In their experiments, the researchers genetically blocked the two thermosensory neurons (known as AFDs) and their ability to sense temperature and discovered there was no response to stress in any cell in the organism without them. (C. elegans is a transparent roundworm whose genome, or complete genetic sequence, is known and is a favorite organism of biologists.)
"This shows, for the first time, that the molecular response to physiological stress is organized by specific neurons and suggests similarities to the neurohormonal response to stress," said Morimoto, who was the first to clone a human heat shock gene in 1985. "The two neurons control how all the other cells in the animal sense and respond to physiological stress."
The team also checked the "machinery" of the 957 other cells (those that are not thermosensory neurons) in the mutant animals and determined that the individual cells could sense an increase in temperature. But, because the thermosensory neurons were not working properly and sending signals, the cells did not initiate a heat shock response. No signal, no response.
The researchers proposed a model whereby this loss of cell autonomy serves to integrate behavioral, metabolic and stress-related responses to establish an organismal response to environmental change.
The researchers would predict, considering the study’s results, that other organisms including humans might have similar classes of neurons that organize and orchestrate a response to stress — a central neuronal control switch for regulating temperature and the expression of genes that protect the health of proteins.
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Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
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Buy clomid pills In addition to Morimoto, other authors of the paper, titled "Regulation of the Cellular Heat Shock Response in Caenorhabditis elegans by Thermosensory Neurons," are Veena Prahlad, a postdoctoral fellow, and Tyler Cornelius, an undergraduate student, both from Northwestern.
Source: Megan Fellman
Northwestern University
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Department Of Defense, HHS Announce Program To Send Mental Health Care Professionals To Help Soldiers With PTSD

Department of Defense and HHS officials on Wednesday announced a program under which the departments will send 200 psychiatrists, social workers and other mental health care professionals to military facilities to treat the increased number of soldiers who have post-traumatic stress disorder, the Washington Times reports.
Adm. Joxel Garcia, assistant secretary for health at HHS, said that the program will coordinate scientific research for the mental health care needs of soldiers and improve treatment and prevention efforts for PTSD. Garcia said, "We are very proud that this is an effort to essentially serve not only the veterans that are coming from war, but also their families."
S. Ward Casscells, assistant DOD secretary for health affairs, said, "The cavalry riding to the rescue is the public health service." He added that the departments might decrease the number of mental health care professionals sent under the program to 100, as the current number assumes "that there would be a surge of people asking for mental counseling and psychological counseling" because of efforts to "reduce the stigma of asking for help, to assure people that this won’t adversely impact their career" (Hudson, Washington Times, 6/5).
Reprinted with kind permission from You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Buy ultram pills Kaiser Family Foundation.
© 2008 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.
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