Is Lack of Sleep a Public Health Crisis?

According to The Washington Post, 'a growing number of scientists, not normally known for being advocates, are bringing evangelical zeal to the message that lack of sleep is an escalating public health crisis that deserves as much attention as the obesity epidemic.' 'We're competing against moneyed interests, with technology and gaming and all that. It's so addictive and so hard to compete with,' said Orfeu Buxton, a sleep researcher at Pennsylvania State University. 'We've had this natural experiment with the Internet that swamped everything else.' From the report: The sleep research community, formerly balkanized into separate sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea, has begun to coalesce around the concept of 'sleep health' -- which for most adults means getting at least seven hours a night. But time in the sack has been steadily decreasing. In 1942, a Gallup poll found that adults slept an average of 7.9 hours per night. In 2013, the average adult had sheared more than an hour off that number. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that a third of adults fail to get the recommended seven hours. In the blink of an eye, in evolutionary terms, humans have radically altered a fundamental biological necessity -- with repercussions we are still only beginning to understand.

For years, animal studies have shown that learning activities are reactivated during sleep, a critical part of how lasting memories are formed. More recently, Princeton postdoctoral researcher Monika Schonauer asked 32 people to sleep in the lab after they had been asked to memorize 100 pictures of houses or faces. By analyzing their patterns of electrical brain activity, she found she could effectively read their minds, predicting which images they had been studying while awake -- because they were replaying them. Sleep problems have long been recognized as a symptom of psychiatric and neurological disorders, ranging from depression to Alzheimer's. But increasingly, researchers are exploring the two-way street between disrupted sleep and disease. And researchers who started out interested in cognitive functions such as memory or brain development are finding themselves focused on sleep because it is so fundamental.

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