Colleges hope to lure owls, offer midnight classes

All-night cram sessions and “after-hours” parties are nothing out of the ordinary in the average college town. Some universities are starting notice the night-owl habits of students and are scheduling classes late. And we’re not talking about traditional night classes. These schools are holding class at midnight.

The extremely late classes are to reach out to shift workers and keep up with an increase in enrollment and demand.

An article in this month’s issue of The Scientist profiles the midnight program at the College of Southern Nevada. The school’s main campus is in Las Vegas, which has among the top shift workers per capita in the U.S.

Classes offered include biology, math and appropriately, astronomy.

Bunker Hill Community College in Boston and Clackamas Community College in Oregon also offer midnight classes. Clackamas holds welding classes until 2 a.m.

This is all par for the course for college students who would be up anyway. A recent study found a majority of college students are poor sleepers. Only 30 percent of students reported sleeping at least eight hours per night.

Waking often to urinate linked to increased death risk

Many people every night wake up in the middle of the night for a trip to the bathroom, and in most cases they think nothing of it. When it happens multiple times a night, there’s new reason to be concerned. New research shows nocturia, or frequent overnight urination, signals a higher risk of dying.

The study released by the American Urological Association found the elevated risk applies to men and women of all ages.

Death rates were highest for men with nocturia aged 20 to 40. Women between 50 and 64 were also among the most at-risk.

The authors at the New England Research Institutes discovered the relationship by comparing mortality rates to responses about nighttime urination in a national survey conducted between 1988 and 1994.

The data was adjusted to account for a number of confounding risk factors, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease and hypertension.

The authors suggest the increased risk of death may be due to any combination of outside risk factors causing sleep disruption. In some cases using the bathroom may happen after waking up for reasons other than needing to urinate.

For instance, people with obstructive sleep apnea may wake because of a pause in breathing and make a trip to the bathroom. Individuals with insomnia may also get out of bed frequently, possibly due to anxiety.

Both insomnia and sleep apnea have been linked to higher mortality rates.

Further research is needed to determine exactly why people who frequently wake up to urinate have a higher risk of death.

Sleep monitored in 520-day mock Mars mission

Six men parted ways with their families and the comforts of earth to embark on a landmark journey to the red planet Thursday morning. The mission will last exactly 520 days, enough time to reach Mars, spend a month on the planets surface, and return home to Earth. At its closest point in orbit, the planets are about 55 million kilometers apart. However the space capsule’s crew will only move a couple hundred feet.

The mission, in reality, is a great experiment in confinement taking place inside a facility near Moscow. The space vessels, the living quarters and the red planet itself are all fakes.

It's an exercise in space madness, borrowing the term from the old sci-fi B-movies. The entire time a team of scientists will be monitoring their every move and measuring their mental and physiological responses.

One of the signs scientists will closely watch is the crews sleeping patterns. The test subjects are wearing a wrist Actiwatch.

As previously reported on this blog, sleeping in space is not always easy. Astronauts on average sleep only 6.5 hours per day. The sleep quality is generally poor, with less time spent in slow-wave sleep. After three months the sleep problems are likely to worsen.

The light-dark cycle is highly variable. On normal missions near Earth the sun rises every 90 minutes. Similar challenges are likely apparent for interplanetary travel.

Then there is the issue of keeping a sleep schedule in tune with mission control. Presently astronauts use bright lights in their crew quarters during waking hours to regulate their sleep-wake cycle.

The Mars mission looks to shape the future of human space travel, despite being only a simulation. In the next 520 days we’ll learn if the human body and psyche is capable of making long journeys to new worlds.

Image Courtesy NASA

Obese short-sleepers eat out often, prefer fatty food

A large Japanese study suggests eating habits are only part of the reason why short sleep duration is interconnected with obesity. Findings published in the May issue of SLEEP show short sleep and high Body Mass Index are linked to a tendency to eat out and a taste for fatty foods. The authors suggest other unknown biologic factors are also at play.

Researchers reached this conclusion using a statistical analysis based on the results of a questionnaire about lifestyle combined with data from annual health checkups. About 3,800 white collar male employees at a Japanese energy company, ages 40 to 59, participated in the study.

The survey contained mostly “yes or no” questions about sleep length, dietary patterns, health history, exercise and substance use.

People categorized as short sleepers (6 hours or less) tended to weigh more and exercise less. The same group was also more likely to prefer fatty food, frequently snack and eat out more. Those dietary habits were also associated with high BMI, a characteristic of obesity.

Based on previous research, the authors state other physiological functions may also drive the relationship between sleep duration and obesity. Other studies have linked sleep restriction to levels of the appetite-regulating hormones leptin and ghrelin.

The study does have some shortcomings as noted by the authors. Women did not participate due to privacy concerns. The findings may not apply to everyone because the study only included middle-aged Japanese men. The measure for sleep duration was self-reported by participants and may not be true in all cases.

Read more about sleep and obesity and sleep and weight gain.

Auto accident rate higher for excessively sleepy Michigan motorists

An analysis of driver data collected by the Michigan State Police further demonstrates the risks associated with drowsy driving. The study published in the June issue of SLEEP is the first to look at the driving records of randomly selected test subjects.

The findings suggest extreme sleepiness multiplies the likelihood of being in an accident causing serious injury. Overall crash rates were about 12 percent higher for tired drivers.

Researchers at Michigan State University and the Henry Ford Hospital Sleep Disorders and Research Center randomly called residents in metro Detroit, a region with demographics similar to the United States as a whole.

Each subject answered a series of questions about sleep and health habits, including use of medications, alcohol and illegal drugs.

About a third of the residents went in for laboratory tests, including an overnight sleep study and a Multiple Sleep Latency Test (MSLT).

Researchers worked with the Michigan State Police to collect crash data from from a 10 year span of the study subjects’ driving.

The drivers were divided up into three groups according to their MSLT scores. Those who were excessively sleepy had an accident rate of 59.4 percent. Only 47.3 percent of alert subjects were in an accident during that period.

Learn more about drowsy driving on SleepEducation.com.