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insomnia

Shining the Light on Breast Cancer Statistics–Literally

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night shift and breast cancer
Pakhnyushchyy / Dollar Photo Club

Most solid cancers have a long list of well-documented ways to prevent them. Treatment, however, remains shaky. Breast, prostate, colon and pancreatic cancers are all very preventable.

But the lifestyle choices known to prevent these deadly cancers are not always easy.  Luckily, many of them are easy to implement and live by.  More troubling, however, are the risk factors that you may not be aware of or that you can’t change.

Exposures in the womb are something that you can’t go back and change.  It is established that chemicals like diethylstilbestrol (DES) that was given to pregnant women in the 1960s increased the risk of breast cancer in the moms as well as the female children later in life.  Other estrogen-like environmental chemicals like BPA and phthalates have been linked to breast cancer and it is highly likely that exposure in the womb would increase breast cancer rates later in life as well.

Things that happened to you as a teenager can have a lifelong effect on breast cancer rates.  You age when you started menstruation, how much sun exposure you got and how much soy you ate as a teen are all influential factors.

But what about your own personal circadian rhythms?

“My what?”

I’m not talking about a blues band from Atlanta.  I’m talking about your body’s daily rhythm as it pertains to day and night.  We are NOT nocturnal creatures.  We’ll leave that to the bats.  We should be sleeping at night.

Despite this, sleeping disturbances are quite common in society.  Insomnia, sleep apnea, restless legs, late nights and problems falling asleep plague society.  Much of this is because we are so stressed that we can’t relax enough at night to settle into a restful night’s sleep.

Then there are the midnight-shift workers and airline personnel that are frequently changing time zones.  This group of people have problems with their circadian rhythms because of their work schedules.

There are documented health problems that midnight shift workers experience.  Weight gain and obesity are on the top of the list.  Higher rates of breast cancer have also been demonstrated.

Which brings us to this particular article.  In it, researchers take a much deeper look at the relationship between sleep disturbances, light exposure at night and breast cancer risk.  In this study, female mice at an increased risk of breast cancer (along the lines of a BRCA mutation) were evaluated to see what kind of effect swapping dark and light exposure had on tumor growth over a lifetime.  At the end of each week, the mice were exposed to a full 24-hour period of either light or dark.

The results were a little shocking:

  • Switching up light and dark led to a decrease in the body’s ability to stop tumor growth, leading to an increased numbers of tumors that developed faster.
  • In addition, there was an increase in body weight.
  • These mice also slept much more, increasing sleep times by 50% (which led to a reduction in overall physical activity)

Based on this study, it is clear that messing up the normal day-night rhythms that we are all designed for creates problems.  There are a number of ways in which this might occur, such as:

  1. Suppression of the brain-protective melatonin by light exposure at night
  2. Stress from sleep disruption
  3. Alterations in lifestyle due to sleep disturbances (smoking, unhealthy diet, altered timing of food)
  4. Decreased vitamin D levels due to lack of sunlight exposure

Whatever the reason, the links continue to be proven.  If you are one of these people that gets exposed to light at night, here are some tips:

If you have a job that requires the midnight shift or lots of travel to different timezones, there may not be a lot you can do in this regard.  However, there is still a long list of lifestyle choices that go a long way to combat your sleep / wake cycle disturbances.  These choices become that much more important.

 

Stressed Out? Problems Sleeping? Taking These May Kill You

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sleep hynotics increase risk of death
Photo courtesy of https://www.flickr.com/photos/hopkinsii/

The typical answer for sleep problems or anxiety is medication. But in no way do these drugs actually fix anything.

Rather, the underlying brain damage that stress causes is allowed to run amok, unchecked. And make no mistake–stress destroys your brain. Shrinks it. Kills off healthy brain cells. Shortens memory. Accompanying the brain damage is damage to the rest of your body as well. Increased risks of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

In summary, not good.

In my opinion, stress is the leading cause of sleep problems. How is your body supposed to sleep when all the cortisol-based alarms in your head are screaming that there is a saber-toothed pacing in the hallway. Managing stress is key to anxiety and sleep problems. Exercise and eating right for your body. Meditation, self-hypnosis or biofeedback for your brain.

Using medication to cover this up is a recipe for disaster and is associated with over a half MILLION deaths per year. I’ve written about this in a previous blog article that can be found by clicking here. So, with this in mind, is nothing new and just reinforces this dangerous association and puts the damaging effects of stress on your health into perspective.

Here are the details of this study looking at 34,727 patients 16 years of age and older who were prescribed anxiolytic or hypnotic drugs and followed for an average of 7.6 years:

• Most common drugs were benzodiazepines (think diazepam) and the “Z” drugs (zaleplon, zolpidem, and zopiclone – think Ambien).
• Those taking one of these drugs had a 346% higher risk of dying in the study period.
• The higher the dose, the greater the risk.
• To put in more plainly, there were about four excess deaths for every 100 patients using one of drugs.

If this was not the first study to find an association between the use of these 2 types of drugs (for anxiety and sleep problems) we could maybe blow off the results. But we can no longer ignore the fact that taking a drug in this class WILL increase your risk of dying. Period. Maybe it’s the stress or maybe some aspect of the drugs themselves. Either way, it doesn’t change the outcome. Dead is dead regardless of how it happened.

Think You’re Doing Everything to Protect Your Heart? Even THIS?

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heart disase sleep
Enough sleep needed to protect the heart

Despite societal beliefs, heart disease is NOT genetic.  It is almost entirely environmental.  Lifestyle factors to lower your risk are very well established.

Most of you can probably name off the top few easily: Exercise, not smoking, plant based diet, don’t stress, avoid animal based saturated fats, more omega-3 fatty acids, etc… But some are a little more elusive and less well known.  But usually these risk factors may play a smaller (but no less important) role, such as BPA in plastic water, dark chocolate, nuts and lycopene in tomatoes.  But what if there was a very important risk factor that had a large impact on your risk of a heart attack or dying of a heart attack that you were not aware of?

Enter this large study out of the Netherlands.  Luckily, the Dutch are a generally healthy people, so these researchers were actually able to find some healthy people to study (as opposed to the US, where researchers have to peek into dark corners and seedy vegan restaurants to find the healthy residents).  Basically, they looked at 17,887 men and women and how their health behaviors were linked to the later risk of heart attacks or cardiac deaths.

Here’s the behaviors and the amount they lowered the risk individually:

  1. Sufficient physical activity (≥3.5 h/week cycling or sports–52% of study participants) led to 26% lower risk.
  2. Healthy diet (Mediterranean Diet Score ≥5–37% of participants) led to 12% lower risk.
  3. Moderate alcohol consumption (≥1 beverage/month–91% men, 78% of women participants).
  4. Non-smoking (65% of participants) led to 43% lower risk.

Overall, when all 4 of these healthy lifestyles were done together, there was an overall 57% lower risk of heart disease and 67% lower risk of fatal heart attack.  Sadly, even in this healthier country, only 12% of the study participants adhered to all the factors studied.  And like many of the studies on heart disease, these guidelines are pretty basic and very easy to achieve.  More specific lifestyle changes would likely lead to much greater reductions.

There was one more behavior they look at:

Sufficient sleep duration of at least 7 hours per night.

Man, I better hit the hiking trail drinking red wine and eating raw nuts dipped in pure cacao.

In the study, 80% of men and 86% of women obtained sufficient sleep.  Pretty sure we wouldn’t see these numbers here in the US with salaried employees with kids (or 5 blog / week health related blog authors…).  Overall, getting sufficient sleep lowered the risk of heart disease by 22% and fatal heart attack by 46%.  These are some pretty strong numbers.

But when added to the 4 factors listed about, the protection jumped, lowering risk of heart disease by 65% and fatal heart attack by 83%.  These are some pretty serious numbers.

Overall, this really should not come as too big of a surprise because we know that sleep is incredibly important and, conversely, not sleeping well is unhealthy.  Study after study have linked poor or too little sleep to increased inflammation,  obesity and diabetes.

Lest you think that you’re ok because you load up on Ambien and Lunesta with your valium, there are some pretty scary associations between the use of these types of drugs and death (arguably something we want to avoid…).

And stress kills sleep quality and duration, which likely feeds into this entire picture of preventing heart disease and fatal heart attacks.

With that said, I’m off to bed to lower my risk of a heart attack..

Melatonin Treatment for Age-Related Insomnia – (11-01-01)

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Melatonin Treatment for Age-Related Insomnia

This study found that melatonin supplementation in the elderly helped to restore normal sleep cycles. A few things to note here–melatonin restores normal sleep, unlike the pharmaceutical sleep aids which interfere with REM sleep. Also, the lowest dose used in the study was just as effective as the higher dose without alterations in daytime levels of melatonin. Remember–if a little is good, more is not always better!

JCEM — Abstracts: Zhdanova et al. 86 (10): 4727

Read entire article here

SLEEP DEPRIVED? YOU PROBABLY DO THIS…

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There is no doubt that sleep is a critical factor in a healthy lifestyle.  Sleep deprivation quickly destroys rational thought and brain function.  Within a short period of time, if the brain does not slip into microsleeps, it is very likely that the organism (human or otherwise) will die.

Nothing destroys sleep patterns faster than stress.  That’s ok in today’s society, because we can just use medications to override the problem.  Pay no mind to the man behind the current claiming that recent studies suggest that this may cost American’s half a million lives per year, all the while being only minimally effective.

So stress begins to interfere with sleep.  Stress also wreaks havoc on pretty much every organ system in our bodies and increases the risk for almost (if not all) chronic diseases that we suffer from.  Stress also begins to affect the decisions we make about things like diet and exercise.  We have seen that stressful situations increase our desire for high calorie, low nutrient density foods instead of broccoli.

This particular study paints the picture just a little grimmer.  Normally, our appetite is partially regulated by the amount of glucose running through our bloodstream.  However, researchers found that, under acute sleep deprivation (a night without any sleep), hedonic desires for food dominated irrespective of glucose levels.  Basically, getting less sleep is going to increase your hunger levels and overall food intake.

Then, putting these studies together, we can bet that your ability to override going for that Cinnabon roll over the vegetarian omelette after a night of sleep deprivation is pretty darn non-existent.