Browsing by Subject "Sleep"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Effect of Lavender Aromatherapy via Inhalation and Sleep Hygiene on Sleep in College Students with Self-reported Sleep Issues
    (2014-05) Lillehei, Angela Smith
    Background: Sleep issues are prevalent and associated with physical, mental, and emotional health, accidents, and human errors and the related health care and work place costs. Both ineffective treatment and lack of treatment contribute to the prevalence of sleep issues and the development of chronic sleep problems. Two thirds of college students report having sleep issues. Better sleep for college students results in better moods, grades, and overall health, with benefits extending into adulthood. Providing safe and effective interventions for this age group has the potential to prevent ongoing sleep issues. Both sleep hygiene and inhaled lavender essential oil (Lavandula angustifolia) have been found to have a positive impact on sleep issues, but both treatments are under researched in this population.Objective: To compare the effectiveness of lavender and sleep hygiene versus sleep hygiene alone on sleep quantity, sleep quality, and well-being and to determine if any effect is sustained at 2-week follow-up. Method: This double-blind RCT included a convenience sample of college students with self-reported sleep issues. Standard sleep surveys, Fitbit® trackers, and a well-being survey were utilized to study the impact of five nights of inhaled lavender via patch and sleep hygiene compared to sleep hygiene and a blank patch at pre-treatment, post treatment, and 2-week follow-up. Results: The sample size was large enough to give the study sufficient power to detect statistically significant differences. The lavender and sleep hygiene group demonstrated better sleep quality at post treatment and follow-up. The sleep hygiene only group also demonstrated better sleep quality but to a lesser extent. Additionally a clinical effect on sleep quality was found for the lavender and sleep hygiene group at post treatment, along with a significant finding for waking feeling refreshed. There was a positive trend in well-being over time for the lavender and sleep hygiene group.Conclusion: This double blind RCT found sleep hygiene and lavender together, and sleep hygiene alone to a lesser degree, to be effective and safe interventions for college students with self-reported sleep issues, with an effect remaining at follow-up. A clinical effect was demonstrated for the group receiving lavender.
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    Enhancement of learning: Does sleep benefit motor skill memory consolidation?
    (2010-12) Borich, Michael Robert
    Purpose: It remains unclear how the brain best recovers from neurologic injury and how to optimally focus rehabilitation approaches to maximize this recovery. Recent research has indicated that sleep may augment this recovery. Sleep has been shown to benefit memory consolidation for certain motor skills, but it remains unclear if this relationship exists for explicit, continuous, goal-directed motor skills with rehabilitation applications. We aimed to determine the neurobehavioral relationship between finger-tracking skill development and sleep following skill training in young, healthy subjects. Methods: Forty subjects were recruited to receive motor skill training in the morning (n=20) or the evening (n=20). Measures of skill and cortical excitability were collected before and after training. Following training, each group had a post-training interval consisting of waking activity or an interval containing sleep. After this twelve-hour interval, skill performance and cortical excitability were reassessed. Subjects underwent another twelve-hour interval containing either waking activity or a sleep episode and came back for a second assessment, twenty-four hours after training. A subset of subjects (n=10) underwent the same procedures except the training period involved simple, repeated movement of the finger. Results: Skill performance improved after training and then continued to improve offline during the first post-training interval. Improvement was not enhanced by sleep during this interval. Cortical excitability was not substantially altered by training but was related to level of skill performance at follow-up assessment. Sleep quality was also found to be related to level of skill at follow-up assessments. The skilled training period did not lead to significantly improved performance compared to simple movement activity. Discussion: These data suggest that sleep is not required for offline memory enhancement for a continuous, visuospatial finger-tracking skill. These findings are in agreement with recent literature indicating the type of motor skill trained may determine the beneficial effect of sleep on post-training information processing. These results, combined with related studies in patient populations, provide a foundation to evaluate the relationship between sleep, changes in neural activity, and the time course of continuous visuospatial motor skill learning in individuals following neurologic insult.
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    An Evaluation of the Effects of School Policies on Child and Adolescent Health and Health-Related Behavior
    (2020-03) Berger, Aaron
    School policies can potentially impact healthy youth development trajectories. This dissertation focused on evaluating two specific types of policies: 1) School district mandated start times for high schools, and 2) School food service policies that are mandated at the federal level. The first two manuscripts examine changes in health or health-related behaviors following a delay in high school start times. A cohort of students at five Minnesota high schools was followed over three years. All schools started at either 7:30am or 7:45am at the Baseline wave of data collection, when the students were in 9th grade. Beginning the year of 10th grade, and continuing through 11th grade, two of the schools delayed their start times by 50 and 65 minutes. In the first manuscript, I assessed if the delay in school start time that was implemented in two schools was associated with changes in adolescent depressed mood. Delaying school start time was not associated with changes in depressed mood score, high risk of depression, or incident high risk of depression, over two years of follow-up. The second manuscript assessed if school start time shifts affected physical activity levels, electronic screen time, or participation in organized sports or extracurricular activities. Later school start times were not associated with changes in any of these outcomes. The final manuscript evaluated whether a national school meal policy, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 (HHFKA), affected children's dietary quality. I used a short dietary panel study to evaluate whether participation in school meals, or the dietary effects of school meals, changed during implementation of the HHFKA. I found that children reported the same percent of calories from school meals during HHFKA implementation, compared to the years before its passage. I found that the dietary benefits from school food increased substantially, compared to before HHFKA passage. Implementation of the HHFKA measurably improved average dietary quality of all US children. Understanding the effects of childhood programs and policies is important for setting children on a healthy life trajectory. The universal, compulsory nature of schools makes them a promising setting for a population approach to health promotion.
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    Examining the Impact of Later High School Start Times on the Health and Academic Performance of High School Students: A Multi-Site Study
    (2014-02) Wahlstrom, Kyla; Dretzke, Beverly; Gordon, Molly; Peterson, Kristin; Edwards, Katherine; Gdula, Julie
    The results from this three-year research study, conducted with over 9,000 students in eight public high schools in three states, reveal that high schools that start at 8:30 AM or later allow for more than 60% of students to obtain at least eight hours of sleep per school night. Teens getting less than eight hours of sleep reported significantly higher depression symptoms, greater use of caffeine, and are at greater risk for making poor choices for substance use. Academic performance outcomes, including grades earned in core subject areas of math, English, science and social studies, plus performance on state and national achievement tests, attendance rates and reduced tardiness show significantly positive improvement with the later start times of 8:35 AM or later. Finally, the number of car crashes for teen drivers from 16 to 18 years of age was significantly reduced by 70% when a school shifted start times from 7:35 AM to 8:55 AM.
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    Melatonin may help you sleep better
    (2012-04-10) Reece, Kayli
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    Sleep disturbances and sleep disorders in older adults: epidemiology, identification and associations with inpatient healthcare utilization
    (2014-09) Paudel, Misti Lyn
    Complaints of insufficient or poor sleep are highly prevalent in older adult populations, with up to 50% reporting symptoms of fragmented sleep, difficulty falling asleep, early awakening and short sleep duration. In this dissertation, I focus on improving our understanding of the epidemiology of sleep disturbances in older adults by addressing three important gaps in the literature.Aim 1: I evaluated the ability of a clinical tool, the STOP-BANG screening questionnaire, to detect obstructive sleep apnea(OSA) in 2,953 older men. The STOP-BANG identified 88.4% of men as having a high likelihood of OSA, resulting in a large number of false positives (sensitivity=94%, specificity=12.7, PPV=18.6%). Results suggest that the STOP-BANG has limited clinical value in a community-dwelling older male population. Aim 2: Little is known about the intra-individual variability of sleep, especially in older adult populations who have a greater burden of sleep complaints. In a cohort of 2,804 older men, significant intra-individual variability in sleep measures was observed, and the strongest independent associative factors with greater sleep variability included race, living alone, smoking, antidepressant use, benzodiazepine use, depression, greater BMI and greater comorbidity burden. Aim 3: Sleep disturbances are associated with comorbid medical conditions, however the extent to which sleep disturbances independently impact inpatient healthcare utilization is not well understood. Data from the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures (SOF), linked to Medicare claims and Kaiser Permanente encounters among 2,103 older women was used to address this question. During 3 years of follow-up, 55% of the cohort was hospitalized at least once. Significant associations between sleep disturbances and greater odds of being hospitalized (31-72% increased odds) were largely explained by greater comorbidity burden, depression and health-related factors in multivariable adjusted models. Findings suggest that sleep disturbances are not independently associated with greater inpatient health-care utilization in older women.
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    Sleep patterns and risk of injury among rural Minnesota adolescents.
    (2009-08) Langner, Deborah Merchant
    Sleep occupies a third of our lives; yet, only of late has credit been given to the significant role it plays in our health and well-being. Teens often are limited in the duration of sleep acquired, due to time-consuming activities, as well as biological and environmental aspects of adolescence. The current study explores potential risk of injury among teens by examining associations between sleep patterns, sleep duration, and injury. Youth at Work, an open cohort from 41 rural high schools in Minnesota, followed 15,002 students from 2001-2003. Data were collected through a self-completed questionnaire, distributed to each student four times during the 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 school years. Questionnaire responses described events in either the summer months (fall administration) or the school year (spring administration). A total of 41, 272 questionnaires were completed. Analysis included odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) calculations using logistic regression, controlling for potential confounders by means of directed acyclic graphs. Results indicated that adolescents who reported sleeping six hours or less every night during the summer had an increased risk of injury (OR = 1.40; CI = 1.13, 1.72). Risk of injury increased further for individuals who slept six hours or less during the weekend nights in the summer, but received optimal sleep on weeknights (OR = 1.60; CI = 1.20, 2.14). During the school year, students who reported six hours of sleep or less during school nights and sub-optimal sleep on weekend nights also had an increased risk of injury (OR = 1.53; CI = 1.07, 2.20), as did individuals who slept nine hours or longer on weekend nights but acquired insufficient sleep on school nights (OR = 1.71; CI = 1.22, 2.39). Among working adolescents, teens employed in entertainment who routinely slept six hours or less or greater than six hours but less than nine hours, had the greatest risk of work-related injury, compared with well-rested teens in this occupation (OR = 3.61; CI = 1.17, 11.09). Construction workers who slept either insufficient or sub-optimal hours also were nearly three times as likely to be injured as teens sleeping optimal hours (OR = 2.69; CI = 1.19, 6.06). Among farmers, risk of injury doubled for young adults who had insufficient sleep some nights, but slept optimally other nights (OR = 2.05; CI = 1.37, 3.07). Improved knowledge of these associations and potential risks could help to target intervention efforts for the prevention of injuries among adolescents.
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    Validating Movement-Based Sleep Assessment in a Pediatric Sample with Developmental Disabilities and Associated Motor Impairment and Intellectual Disability
    (2022-04) Merbler, Alyssa
    Individuals with developmental disabilities (DD) have increased rates of sleep disorders compared to their typically-developing peers. Poor sleep can have serious negative consequences for the individual and their family’s health and quality of life, underscoring the need for appropriate sleep assessment and intervention. Objective measures of sleep offer advantages over commonly-used proxy-report sleep measures, such as the ability to directly measure sleep as it is happening and not requiring recall. Polysomnography (PSG) is the current gold-standard, but it has a high resource and personnel burden, limiting its availability and utility for the number of children with DD who need sleep assessment. Actigraphy (ACT) is an alternative objective, non-invasive, cost-effective tool that measures movement via a watch-like device to score sleep and wake. ACT has been extensively validated against PSG in typically-developing adults and children, but there is limited validation in DDs. The purpose of this study was to conduct an initial validation of ACT in the largest sample of children with DD and associated motor impairment and intellectual disability to date. Fifty-one participants wore an ACT device while undergoing standard-of-care PSG. Results indicated that the low movement threshold setting of ACT analyses (i.e. less movement required to score wake) had the best specificity without sacrificing excellent sensitivity, compared to the medium and high thresholds. Overall, ACT had high ability to detect true sleep (0.93), but weak ability to detect true wake (0.45). This pattern is consistent with the broad ACT validation literature. However, these data show wide variability in agreement, indicating ACT shows high agreement for some but poor agreement for others. Summary-level comparisons and Bland-Altman plots showed ACT slightly over estimated onset latency and sleep efficiency, over estimated total sleep time, but underestimated wake after sleep onset. There was wide variability in individual differences between PSG and ACT. There may be relationships with motor impairment and age, but future work with a larger sample is needed to elucidate these potential relations. This work is necessary to provide guidance on ACT’s use in DD populations with associated motor impairment and intellectual disability.