Heena Sharma Blog

Healthy sleep habits can make a big difference in one's life but work week keeps us all a bit short on sleep, which can be severely harmful, says a study. In the Journal of Lipid Research, researchers at Pennsylvania State University reported that just a few days of sleep deprivation can make participants feel less full after eating and metabolise the fat in food differently. Sleep disruption has been known to be having harmful effects on metabolism for some time. Orfeu Buxton, a professor at Penn State and one of the senior authors of the new study, contributed to a lot of the research demonstrating that long-term sleep restriction puts people at a higher risk of obesity and diabetes. However, Buxton said, most of those studies have focused on glucose metabolism, which is important for diabetes, while relatively few have assessed digestion of lipids from food. Kelly Ness, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, ran the study when she was a grad...

Men who sleep less than six hours a night may be at an increased risk of cardiovascular disease compared to those who sleep between seven and eight hours, a new study suggests. The study showed that poor quality sleep of less than six hours increases the risk of atherosclerosis by 27 per cent compared to seven to eight hours of sleep. Atherosclerosis refers to the build-up of fats, cholesterol and other substances in and on the artery walls throughout the body. On the other hand, women who slept more than eight hours a night had an increased risk of atherosclerosis . "Cardiovascular disease is a major global problem and we are preventing and treating it using several approaches, including pharmaceuticals, physical activity and diet," said Jose M. Ordovas, researcher at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares Carlos III (CNIC) in Madrid. "But the study emphasizes we have to include sleep as one of the weapons we use to fight heart ...