People who feel lonely and socially isolated might benefit from more sleep, especially if they’re a young adult, a new study suggests. Better sleep is associated with significantly less emotional and social loneliness, researchers report. Younger adults in particularbenefit from better sleep, but people of all ages report less loneliness after they’ve slept well, results show. “Loneliness is an urgent public health crisis, and there is a pressing need for providers to better understand and treat it,” said lead researcher Joseph Dzierzewski, vice president of research and scientific affairs at the National Sleep Foundation in Washington, D.C. The U.S. Surgeon General’s Office warned in 2023 about a public health crisis of loneliness and isolation, researchers noted. Even before the pandemic, about half of U.S. adults were experiencing loneliness, and the social isolation measures required to protect health likely made matters even worse, the warning said. “Our results highlight the important role that sleep plays in understanding loneliness across the adult lifespan,” Dzierzewksi said in a university news release. “Perhaps efforts to improve sleep health could have a beneficial effect on loneliness, especially for young people.” Adults should get about seven hours of sleep each night to promote optimal health and alertness, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine says. For this study, nearly 2,300 adults with an average age of 44 completed an online sleep health…  read on >  read on >

Strapping a mask to your face can make for a happier marriage, a new study suggests. Relationships with partners flourish if a person with sleep apnea starts using a continuous positive air pressure (CPAP) machine on a regular basis, researchers found. Snoring is one of the most recognizable symptoms of sleep apnea, and it can reach timber-rattling levels for some. This means both the person with sleep apnea and their partner often lose lots of sleep to the health problem. “No one is at their best when they aren’t sleeping,” said lead researcher Wendy Troxel, a senior behavioral scientist with RAND Corp. “In an age where we see couples going through ‘sleep divorces,’ and roughly 50% of marriages end in actual divorce, recognizing how healthy sleep can contribute to healthy relationships is imperative,” Troxel added. Nearly 30 million Americans have sleep apnea, a chronic disease in which the upper airway collapses repeatedly during sleep, disrupting normal breathing, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. The new study involved 36 couples in which a person with sleep apnea started using a CPAP machine, which uses mild levels of air pressure delivered through a mask to keep the throat open. After three months, the couples reported higher levels of relationship satisfaction and lower levels of conflict if the CPAP machine was regularly used.  “Recognizing that sleep…  read on >  read on >

The wee hours of the morning could be the most dangerous for someone on the brink of suicide or homicide, a new study shows. There’s a five-fold greater risk for suicide and an eight-fold greater risk for homicide between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. for those awake in the still of the night, researchers report. “Disrupted sleep may acutely impair rational thought, which can drive impulsive behaviors in vulnerable individuals,” said lead study author Andrew Tubbs, a researcher in the University of Arizona’s Sleep and Health Research Program. Statistics show that nearly 19% of suicides and 36% of homicides take place at night, researchers said in background notes. For the new study, they analyzed 15 years of U.S. data involving more than 78,000 suicides and 50,000 homicides. Teens and young adults were three times more likely to commit suicide in the still of the night, researchers reported May 29 in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. Nighttime risk of suicide is also higher for people who’ve been drinking and those who’ve been fighting with their partner. However, being awake late did not seem to increase suicide risk among people with a history of suicidal thoughts or prior attempts, results show. The risk for homicide did not vary by age, but young adults accounted for more than half of all homicide victims at night. Waking in the…  read on >  read on >

People who regularly stay up until the wee hours of the morning could be harming their mental health, a new study finds. Regardless of whether people were morning larks or a night owls, they tended to have higher rates of mental and behavioral disorders if they stayed up late, researchers found. The mental health risk associated with staying up late cropped up regardless of a person’s preferred sleep timing, also known as their chronotype. “We found that alignment with your chronotype is not crucial here, and that really it’s being up late that is not good for your mental health,” said senior researcher Jamie Zeitzer, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Medicine, in California. “The big unknown is why.” These findings run counter to previous studies which found that people who stick to their chronotype tend to be healthier, Zeitzer added. For the study, researchers tracked nearly 74,000 middle-aged and older people in the United Kingdom. More than 19,000 said they were morning types, while about 6,800 identified as evening types. The rest fell somewhere in the middle. The participants were asked to wear an activity monitor to track their sleep over seven days. Their preferred sleep timing was then compared to both their actual sleep and their mental health, which was determined through their health records. Analysis showed that night owls…  read on >  read on >

Ambulances meant for people having a mental health crisis could help folks get the care they need with less confrontation and friction, a new study says. People transported to the hospital by a “psychiatric ambulance” required fewer restraints or coercive measures than those transported by the police, according to results from an Amsterdam program. In 2014, Amsterdam introduced a psychiatric ambulance service operated by a trained driver and a psychiatric nurse. It looks just the same as a typical ambulance, but inside it’s stripped of visible medical equipment to create a more tranquil environment. Patients can sit upright or lay on a stretcher, with a soft Velcro restraint or sedative medication available as needed. Researchers compared nearly 500 police transports in the four months prior to introduction of the psychiatric ambulance, and more than 650 ambulance transports that occurred within six months after the service started. They found stark differences when it came to the use of restraints: 86% of people transported by ambulance were not restrained, compared with 57% of those transported by police. 42% of people transported by police were handcuffed, compared to less than 1% who went by ambulance. However, the occurrence of aggressive events was similarly low in both the ambulance and police groups, around 2%. The rates of hospital admission were similar between the two groups, 36% for ambulance versus…  read on >  read on >

America’s college students seem to be more stressed than ever, with a new report finding a sharp rise in cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and acute stress disorder (ASD) on campuses across the country. In a “national sample of U.S. college students, we found a notable increase in the prevalence of PTSD and ASD,” concluded a team led by Yusan Zhai, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Rates of PTSD rose by 4.1 percentage points between 2017 and 2022, and stress disorder diagnoses rose by 0.5 percentage points, the data showed. Their findings were published May 30 in the journal JAMA Network Open. As Zhai’s group explained, any number of events — campus shootings, sexual assault, physical violence and natural disasters, for example — can trigger either PTSD or ASD. PTSD can lead to more persistent symptoms, while ASD’s impact may be more transient — anywhere from a few days to a month. In their study, the Birmingham researchers focused on 2017 through 2022, “a period marked by escalated societal stressors and global health crises,” including, of course, the pandemic. They looked at data from the ongoing Healthy Minds study, which tracks the mental health of over 392,000 people attending 332 different colleges and universities across the United States. About 58% of the students were female. The data showed that during the study…  read on >  read on >

Even as suicide rates have risen among Americans generally, one group appears to be bucking that trend: People diagnosed with cancer. Experts are crediting improved access to counseling and other “psychosocial care” with easing the emotional toll of cancer and keeping more patients from making tragic decisions. Nevertheless, cancer patients still face elevated risks for suicide, noted a team led by Dr. Qiang Liu of the National Cancer Center at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing. “The cancer-related suicide rate is estimated to be double that of the general population in the United States,” Liu’s group noted in the study. “Notably, the risk of suicide in men is significantly higher compared to women. This heightened cancer-related suicide risk remains elevated for up to 15 years following their diagnosis.” The new report was published May 27 in the journal Translational Psychiatry. In the study, Liu’s team looked at data on over 5 million Americans who’d been diagnosed with cancer between 1975 and 2017. Of the more than 8,000 who died by suicide, most (82%) were male, white (93%) and older (73% were ages 50 to 79). However, there was some good news: The rate at which suicide claimed the lives of people with cancer has declined steadily over the decades. These deaths first started to decline gradually between 1989 and 2013, the numbers showed,…  read on >  read on >

The old joke holds that fatherhood causes a man’s hair to go prematurely gray. Whether or not that’s true, being a father does appear to put men at greater risk of poor heart health later in life, a new study finds. Dads tended to have worse heart health than men without kids, based on factors like diet, exercise, smoking, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar, researchers reported in the journal AJPM Focus. “The changes in heart health we found suggest that the added responsibility of childcare and the stress of transitioning to fatherhood may make it difficult for men to maintain a healthy lifestyle, such as a healthy diet and exercise,” said researcher Dr. John James Parker, an assistant professor of pediatrics and general internal medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. For the study, researchers analyzed data from more than 2,800 men ages 45 to 84. Although fathers had worse heart health, the study also found they actually have lower death rates than men without kids. That might be because fathers have a better social support system, and social connectedness has been linked to a lower risk of death, Parker said. “Fathers may also be more likely to have someone as their future caretaker [i.e., their children] to help them attend medical appointments and manage medications and treatments as they…  read on >  read on >

Children exposed to traffic and other noise in their neighborhoods may be at higher risk for anxiety, researchers conclude, while air pollution could raise risks for other mental health woes. “Childhood and adolescent noise pollution exposure could increase anxiety by increasing stress and disrupting sleep,” wrote a team led by Joanne Newbury, of Bristol Medical School in Bristol, U.K. The findings were published May 28 in the journal JAMA Network Open. In the study, Newbury’s team looked at data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, which tracked the health of children born in England between 1991 and 1993. A total of 9,065 supplied data on their mental health into adulthood. About 1 in every 5 reported some history of psychosis, 11.4% reported depression and 9.7% reported anxiety. The researchers said that kids who’d been exposed to “noise pollution” in their neighborhoods during childhood and/or adolescence had about a 20% higher odds for anxiety as they grew older. Neighborhood air pollution was also a risk factor for mental health issues: Children exposed to relatively high levels of particulate matter (tiny bits of pollution entering the lungs) while still in the womb had an 11% higher odds for psychosis, compared to those who didn’t have such exposures, and a 10% rise in depression risk. The researchers stressed the data couldn’t prove that noise or…  read on >  read on >

Prior studies have suggested that binge eating disorder may not last long, but a more rigorous look at the illness finds that just isn’t so. “The big takeaway is that binge-eating disorder does improve with time, but for many people it lasts years,” said study first author Kristin Javaras, assistant psychologist in the Division of Women’s Mental Health at McLean Hospital in Boston. “As a clinician, oftentimes the clients I work with report many, many years of binge-eating disorder, which felt very discordant with studies that suggested that it was a transient disorder,” she said in a hospital news release. “It’s very important to understand how long binge-eating disorder lasts and how likely people are to relapse so that we can better provide better care.” In binge eating disorder, which typically arises around a person’s mid-20s, people feel their eating is out of their control. Anywhere from 1 to 3 percent of American adults are thought to have the disorder. According to Javaras’ team, prior studies looking at binge eating disorder were either retrospective (meaning they often relied on people’s memory of their disorder). If they were prospective (following patients through time) they were often very small (less than 50 people) or didn’t include people tackling severe obesity. In the new study, Javaras’ team tracked outcomes for 137 adults diagnosed with binge-eating disorder for five…  read on >  read on >