Sleep Disorders

American scullcap (Scutellaria lateriflora) was used in Colonial times to treat rabies, fever and premenstrual syndrome. The herb is a tall-growing, blue-flowered member of the mint family that grows in woods and lush grasslands. American scullcap is different from European and Chinese scullcap, which have a different set of purported medicinal powers. * Uses: Today, American scullcap is used most often for insomnia, nervous tension, stress and anxiety.

If you snore, but have never mentioned the problem to a doctor, it's time to wake up. You may suffer from sleep apnea, which mounting evidence suggests can have serious effects on health, especially the heart. "Apnea" refers to any interruption of normal breathing. Overweight people often experience these brief interruptions while they sleep because flabby throat tissue narrows their airways, interfering with the flow of oxygen. But apnea can occur in trim people too.

Some patients never do more than stub a toe as they stagger about in the dark. Others end up requiring emergency treatment for severe injuries. Still others don't harm themselves but may seriously injure their bed partners with violent punching or kicking. Remarkably, these are all symptoms of a medical condition that arises only when a sufferer is fast asleep. REM sleep behavior disorder, or RBD, is a misunderstood and often misdiagnosed problem.

More than 300 over-the-counter remedies promise to stop, or curtail, snoring, but physicians who studied one of each of the three main types found them ineffective. Participants (29 male snorers and 11 female snorers) used a lubricating mouth spray, a nasal dilator strip, and an ergonomically shaped pillow on alternating nights. On the nights in between, they used nothing.

So the patient goes to a neurologist. Every night, he tells the doctor, he gets these creepy, crawly feelings in his legs as he starts to drift off to sleep. It's not pain, exactly, but an irresistible urge to move his legs. He gets up, does a few deep knee bends. That helps. The neurologist listens, riveted. But as soon as the patient goes back to bed, the creepy-crawlies start up again. Sometimes, his legs start kicking periodically too.

Millions of Americans are night owls, routinely staying up past 2 in the morning and sleeping until noon whenever possible. For clubgoers and some shift workers, such a schedule is a necessity. But for 9-to-5 people, stay-at-home parents or anyone else with daytime obligations, it can be an intractable, self-perpetuating cycle that disrupts one's career and personal life. I'm a night owl.

When the occasional night spent walking the floor with a crying baby or rocking a toddler becomes a common occurrence, pediatricians often advise a little pharmaceutical help. A survey of 671 mostly suburban pediatricians showed that 75% had recommended sleeping medication for a child within the last six months. But few studies have examined the effectiveness of sleeping medicines in children, and no medication has been approved for them by the Food and Drug Administration.

The difference between good and bad sleepers is not the amount of stress in their lives but how they handle that stress. A three-week Canadian study of people with insomnia and those who had no sleeping problems found that both groups experienced about the same amount of daily aggravations. However, those who had trouble going to sleep or who awoke in the middle of the night and tossed and turned were more likely to see their daily lives as stressful.

Sometimes there's a clear reason we're wired, tired and desperate at 3 a.m. Work pressure. A broken relationship. Threats of terror. But very often people with chronic insomnia have no idea why they're waking up at night. "That's why they come and ask for help," said Dr. Barry Krakow, director of the Sleep and Human Health Institute, a research clinic in Albuquerque that specializes in the treatment of insomnia due to trauma-related stress.

Stuttering and a serious form of snoring known as sleep apnea may be linked, and both conditions may be caused by brain damage sustained early in life, U.S. researchers said Monday. A team at UCLA found that nearly 40% of sleep apnea patients it studied also stuttered as children. Sleep apnea is a serious form of snoring in which a patient's breathing actually stops several times a night. It is linked with a high rate of heart death.