Smoking marijuana may help relieve the muscle tightness and pain of multiple sclerosis, a small U.S. study suggests. Many people with MS often suffer from spasticity, an uncomfortable and disabling condition in which the muscles become tight and difficult to control. Spasticity can be controlled with medications but the symptoms may continue or the anti-spasticity drugs may carry adverse effects such as drowsiness, sedation, and muscle weakness. The medical marijuana used in the study the strength of cigarettes most commonly available in the community at the time of the research. Most trials testing medical marijuana have focused on oral forms. Now a randomized trial has put smoked cannabis to the test against placebo for 30 people with MS whose spasticity resisted treatment. "Using an objective measure, we saw a beneficial effect of inhaled cannabis on spasticity among patients receiving insufficient relief from traditional treatment," Dr. Jody Corey-Bloom, of the department of neuroscience at University of California, San Diego and her co-authors concluded in Monday's issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal. In the study, the average age of participants was 50 and 63 per cent were female. More than half of the participants needed walking aids and 20 per cent used wheelchairs. Copyright © CBC 2012

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16791 - Posted: 05.15.2012

By Jennifer Huget When my daughter was little, she was quite the sleepwalker. Until you have a sleepwalker in the family, you have no idea how terrifying it can be. You worry about whether they’ll safely navigate the stairs when they decide to sleep-stumble from the second-floor bedroom where they’re supposed to be, well, sleeping, to the first-floor family room where you’re watching TV. Or that they’ll open a door and wander outside in the middle of the night — and that you might not hear them leave. Or that they’ll pick up a knife in the kitchen or light a burner. . . . Let’s just say it’s hard to sleep with a sleepwalker around. And if you have ever tried to talk to a sleepwalking child, you know how worrying it is to see how completely out of it they seem. My son never walked in his sleep, and my daughter finally outgrew the behavior, which affects up to 30 percent of children, according to the introduction to a study published Monday afternoon in the journal Neurology. The new research set out to determine how common sleepwalking is among adults. According to the report, the phenomenon has been little studied, so data about its prevalence are quite limited. The best estimate before this new study was that between 2 and 3 percent of adults walk in their sleep; the new research puts the number of adults who have walked in their sleep at least once in the past year at 3.6 percent. And 29.2 percent of those surveyed reported having walked in their sleep at least once in their life. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 16790 - Posted: 05.15.2012

Shannon Pettypiece Testosterone replacement has long been prescribed for men who suffer from abnormally low levels of the male sex hormone, but overuse can lead to infertility and can even speed the growth of prostate cancer. That hasn't stopped Michael Murray, a healthy 43-year-old home stager who works in New York and Chicago, from getting frequent testosterone injections to raise his energy level and give his bodybuilding regime a boost. "Am I making a deal with the devil? A little bit, but I have to think about my quality of life," Murray explains. "It is like I'm in my 20s again." In what may become one of the most sought-after lifestyle drugs since the introduction of Pfizer's Viagra 14 years ago, new testosterone drugs from Eli Lilly, Abbott Laboratories, and other drugmakers are hot. Prescriptions for testosterone replacement therapies have more than doubled since 2006 to 5.6 million last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Sales are expected to triple to $5 billion by 2017, forecasts Global Industry Analysts. As many as 13.8 million men older than 45 in the United States have low levels of testosterone, according to a 2006 study in the International Journal of Clinical Practice. The male sex hormone begins to decline after age 30, and tends to drop about 1 percent each year. Lower-than-normal levels can lead to a loss of libido, a decrease in bone and muscle mass, and depression. © 2012 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16789 - Posted: 05.14.2012

By Jennifer Verdolin Typically we think of eavesdropping as a human endeavor. Individually we all do it to a certain degree. Call it social listening, if you will. Sometimes we can’t help but overhear a conversation. Other times we might deliberately try to listen in on what someone else is saying. I remember as a kid putting a cup up against the door to try and hear what was going on behind closed doors. Collectively as nations we eavesdrop on a massive scale, in times of peace and war. Currently, the military spends a considerable amount of money on ‘electronic intelligence’, so much so that there is an entire center devoted to eavesdropping: Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. We certainly did not invent this strategy of watching or listening in on others. Like most things, we’ve copied it from nature. Eavesdropping is ubiquitous across the animal kingdom. Whenever substantial time or resources are devoted to an activity there is usually a payoff to be found. This got me wondering, what is the payoff for eavesdropping? Several advantages immediately come to mind. For example, perhaps you can increase your access to resources. One way to do this would be to avoid wasting time going after resources that someone else has already used up. This is frequently observed among competitors searching for similar resources. When one thinks of fierce competitors, two stingless bee species may not be the first thing that comes to mind. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 16788 - Posted: 05.14.2012

By IAN URBINA WASHINGTON — In what could prove to be one of their most far-reaching decisions, psychiatrists and other specialists who are rewriting the manual that serves as the nation’s arbiter of mental illness have agreed to revise the definition of addiction, which could result in millions more people being diagnosed as addicts and pose huge consequences for health insurers and taxpayers. The revision to the manual, known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or D.S.M., would expand the list of recognized symptoms for drug and alcohol addiction, while also reducing the number of symptoms required for a diagnosis, according to proposed changes posted on the Web site of the American Psychiatric Association, which produces the book. In addition, the manual for the first time would include gambling as an addiction, and it might introduce a catchall category — “behavioral addiction — not otherwise specified” — that some public health experts warn would be too readily used by doctors, despite a dearth of research, to diagnose addictions to shopping, sex, using the Internet or playing video games. Part medical guidebook, part legal reference, the manual has long been embraced by government and industry. It dictates whether insurers, including Medicare and Medicaid, will pay for treatment, and whether schools will expand financing for certain special-education services. Courts use it to assess whether a criminal defendant is mentally impaired, and pharmaceutical companies rely on it to guide their research. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16787 - Posted: 05.14.2012

By Rachel Ehrenberg Specialized goggles that send information to solar cell–like chips implanted in the eyes may one day help some blind people seeThe new implants, which have been tested in rat retinas in a dish, would require less invasive surgery than similar devices now being tested and offer a higher-resolution view of the world. The new system, reported online May 13 in Nature Photonics, still needs work before being tested in people. But one day it may return partial sight to people suffering from conditions such as retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease that can lead to night blindness and tunnel vision, or macular degeneration, in which sharp central vision is lost but peripheral vision remains. In those conditions, vision suffers when light-detecting cells at the back of the inner eye are damaged, even though the nerve cells that send visual information to the brain may remain intact. No current treatments can restore vision for such retinal damage, says Lotfi Merabet, an eye specialist at Massachusetts Eye and Ear in Boston. The new work “is certainly very promising,” he says. Developing the implants took many years and many scientists, says study coauthor James Loudin, an electrical engineer at Stanford University. “The sheer number of new technologies that had to be developed — it’s amazing,” he says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 16786 - Posted: 05.14.2012

DULL fingers? Blame your genes. It has just been discovered that sensitivity to touch is heritable, and apparently linked to hearing as well. Gary Lewin and colleagues at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Germany, measured touch in 100 healthy pairs of fraternal and identical twins. They tested finger sensitivity in two ways: by response to a high-frequency vibration and the ability to identify the orientation of very fine grating. Lewin's team found that up to 50 per cent of the variation in sensitivity to touch was genetically determined. Audio tests also showed that those with good hearing were more likely to have sensitive touch. The link between the two is logical, as both touch and hearing rely on sensory cells that detect mechanical forces. Next the researchers studied touch sensitivity in students with congenital deafness. They found that 1 in 5 also had impaired touch, indicating that some genes causing deafness may also dull the sense of touch. When they looked at a subset of individuals who were deaf and blind due to Usher syndrome, they found that mutations in a single gene, USH2A, caused both the disease and reduced sensitivity to touch (PLoS Biology, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001318). The next step is to try to identify more genes that affect our sense of touch. "There are many more genes than just the one we found," says Lewin, adding that finding them "will hopefully show us more about the biology of touch". © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16785 - Posted: 05.14.2012

Jessica Hamzelou, contributor In his latest book The Moral Molecule, neuroeconomist Paul Zak describes oxytocin’s role in trust, bonding and even virtuous behaviour. New Scientist caught up with him about avoiding the term “the cuddle chemical” and trying not to make a bride faint on her wedding day. Why study moral behaviour? Before my mother was my mother she was a nun, so morality was something that was very present. We had very clear top-down guidance: “you do this and you go to heaven, you do that and you go to hell”. Even as a child I felt that that was incredibly harsh and wrong. The idea that there’s some perfect received wisdom to tell the difference between right and wrong just didn’t make any sense to me. I wanted to find a concrete, biological basis for good and bad behaviour in humans. It’s not my place to say whether God exists or not, but it seemed like there were all kinds of good people who weren’t raised Catholic like I was. And that seemed like a deep mystery about life: if there are 2000 religions, why do we see a large number of those having the same kind of prescriptions for what constitutes good behaviour and a good life? That was the deeper, personal reason that, in retrospect, drove ten years of hard labour in the lab and in the field. What got you interested in oxytocin? I had done work in the late 1990s showing that countries in which levels of interpersonal trust were high were richer countries, and countries that were poor were by and large low trust countries. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Emotions; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16784 - Posted: 05.12.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV Think you can tell which way a ballerina is twirling? A new animation by psychophysiologist Marcel de Heer shows that a dancer's silhouette is identical regardless of the direction in which she is spinning. The video starts with two mirror-image ballerinas spinning in opposite ways and a third one in silhouette, which could belong to either dancer. So how does our brain make sense of the ambiguous figure? The perceived direction of motion varies from person to person. According to de Heer, our visual system makes a quick decision on a subconscious level about the direction of rotation and the result of that decision is what we see. "It makes this choice while there is a big chance it is the wrong one," he says. An online study of a similar illusion revealed that most people see the silhouette moving clockwise. However those who initially see it turning counterclockwise are more likely to be able to reverse its direction of motion. In the course of the animation, all three ballerinas become silhouettes, at which point their motion is perceived to be synchronised. The reason for this is unclear but de Heer plans to investigate the phenomenon in future research. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16783 - Posted: 05.12.2012

by Andy Coghlan Turning the body's brown fat into a furnace fuelled by unwanted flab might provide a new way to lose weight. The main role of brown fat is to burn just enough fuel to keep body temperature constant. This suggests that working out how the body controls the brown fat thermostat could lead to new drugs that order it to burn more energy than usual, gradually consuming stores of the unwanted white fat that leads to obesity. Recent research suggests the thermostat might be a protein called bone morphogenetic protein 8B, or bmp8B. Mice kept at a chilly 5 °C make about 140 times more bmp8B than mice at room temperature. Now, Andrew Whittle of the University of Cambridge and colleagues have confirmed the hunch, using mice unable to make the protein. These mice became obese even when fed a normal diet. They grew even larger when given a high-fat diet. Whittle's team found that mice make bmp8B in a part of the brain called the ventromedial hypothalamus, and inside brown fat itself. The protein seems to work by increasing nerve signals to brown fat from the brain, and by making the fat cells more attentive to the signals so they burn more energy than normal. The researchers discovered that lab-grown brown fat cells could be made to burn more energy than usual by treating them with bmp8B. What's more, mice given extra bmp8B through infusions into the brain lost weight. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16782 - Posted: 05.12.2012

By DANIELLE OFRI, M.D. Right after residency, I took a summer job in a family practice in a beach town on Long Island, covering Fridays and weekends for the regular doctors. The setting was quite different from my training in an urban hospital. It was a bit of a culture shock to go from a world of critically ill hospitalized patients to an outpatient suburban setting where most weekend appointments were for sore throats, rashes and sprained ankles. But I quickly became a pro at Lyme disease identification. Danielle Ofri, M.D.Joon Park Danielle Ofri, M.D. One day, a woman in her early 40s came for an appointment. She asked me to prescribe fen-phen, a weight-loss pill that combined the drugs fenfluramine and phentermine and was being heavily marketed at the time. I remember gazing at her from across the desk, thinking that she certainly didn’t look overweight, and asked her why she wanted weight-loss pills. She grasped the skin around her stomach and said ruefully, “I’ve been trying to get rid of these extra pounds after having kids.” I leaned over to see what she was holding in her grip. It looked like a normal amount of stomach to me. Having just spent the past three years taking care of critically ill hospital patients who were dealing with heart attacks, septic shock, pneumonia and bleeding ulcers, I had a hard time seeing a few extra pounds as a medical issue. I was also a little leery of the whole idea of weight-loss pills, which seemed like a Band-Aid approach to what was usually a lifetime pattern of poor eating habits and inactivity. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16781 - Posted: 05.12.2012

by Erin Loury As if you needed another reason to despise your alarm clock. A new study suggests that, by disrupting your body's normal rhythms, your buzzing, blaring friend could be making you overweight. The study concerns a phenomenon called "social jetlag." That's the extent to which our natural sleep patterns are out of synch with our school or work schedules. Take the weekends: many of us wake up hours later than we do during the week, only to resume our early schedules come Monday morning. It's enough to make your body feel like it's spending the weekend in one time zone and the week in another. But is social jetlag actually bad for your health? To investigate, chronobiologist Till Roenneberg at the University of Munich in Germany and colleagues compiled data from tens of thousands of responses to an internet survey on sleep patterns and other behaviors. Previous work with such data has already yielded some clues. "We have shown that if you live against your body clock, you're more likely to smoke, to drink alcohol, and drink far more coffee," says Roenneberg. In the new study, the team measured the social jetlag of people ages 16 to 65 by calculating how offset sleep times were on workdays and non-workdays. They then constructed a mathematical model that gauged how well biological factors, such as age, gender, sleep duration, and social jet lag could predict body weight. They found that the first three factors were important predictors of body weight for all people. In addition, for people who are already on the heavy side, greater social jet lag corresponded to greater body weight. However, social jet lag was not a good predictor for people with normal body weights, the team reports online today in Current Biology. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Obesity
Link ID: 16780 - Posted: 05.12.2012

By Rebecca Cheung The settings for a person’s biological clock might provide clues to when, during the day, he or she will be more active. What’s more, these same settings could be linked to what time of day a person might die, a new study finds. Understanding the biological basis of these built-in, or circadian, clocks “could lead to products that eventually allow us to shift the clock forwards or backwards,” says Philip De Jager, a neurologist with Harvard Medical School in Boston. He and his colleagues describe their work online April 26 in Annals of Neurology. Being able to alter these clocks could prove useful for shift workers, such as pilots, who might face trouble working against their intrinsic daily rhythms, De Jager adds. And patients can be better cared for if doctors know what times of day are most critical. Previously, scientists have shown that many genes are involved in regulating people’s inherent daily wake and sleep patterns. Disruptions to this natural circadian rhythm are often linked to serious health conditions, including diabetes. In the new work, De Jager’s team took a close look at common subtle tweaks that occur in a circadian clock-regulating gene called PER1. By mostly focusing on DNA samples collected from a group of 537 older adults of European ancestry, the team found that there were three different variations of PER1. The researchers also found these variations in another smaller group of 38 people between 18 and 72 years old. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 16779 - Posted: 05.12.2012

By Allen Frances* When the third edition of psychiatry’s manual of mental illness, the DSM-III, was published 30 years ago, there was great optimism it would soon be the willing victim of its own success, achieving a kind of planned obsolescence. Surely, the combining of a reasonably reliable system of descriptive diagnosis with the revolutionary new tools of neuroscience would quickly yield a deep and broad understanding of psychopathology. And just as surely this would translate into standardized biological tests that would replace the cookbook listing of subjective symptoms and subjectively evaluated behaviors that comprised the DSM-III criteria sets. Sadly, progress has been much slower than anyone expected, with many exciting findings turning out to be no more than dead ends. The vast research funding has indeed provided a basic science revolution, but so far its discoveries have had no impact whatever on clinical diagnosis. Even the most promising candidates—biological tests for the accurate diagnosis of dementia—are several years away. And, for the rest of psychiatry, there is no immediate prospect that our rich basic science knowledge base and powerful investigative tools will contribute to clinical practice any time soon. We have learned a great deal in the past 30 years, but perhaps the most important lesson is that the brain is ineluctably complex and reveals its secrets only slowly and in very small packages. There has been no low hanging fruit. The expectation that there would be simple gene or neurotransmitter or circuitry explanations for schizophrenia or bipolar or obsessive-compulsive disorder has turned out to be naïve and illusory. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16778 - Posted: 05.12.2012

by Michael Balter Three years ago, a stone-throwing chimpanzee named Santino jolted the research community by providing some of the strongest evidence yet that nonhumans could plan ahead. Santino, a resident of the Furuvik Zoo in Gävle, Sweden, calmly gathered stones in the mornings and put them into neat piles, apparently saving them to hurl at visitors when the zoo opened as part of angry and aggressive "dominance displays." But some researchers were skeptical that Santino really was planning for a future emotional outburst. Perhaps he was just repeating previously learned responses to the zoo visitors, via a cognitively simpler process called associative learning. And it is normal behavior for dominant male chimps to throw things at visitors, such as sticks, branches, rocks, and even feces. Now Santino is back in the scientific literature, the subject of new claims that he has begun to conceal the stones so he can get a closer aim at his targets—further evidence that he is thinking ahead like humans do. The debate over Santino is part of a larger controversy over whether some humanlike animal behaviors might have simpler explanations. For example, Sara Shettleworth, a psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, argued in a widely cited 2010 article entitled, "Clever animals and killjoy explanations in comparative psychology," that the zookeepers and researchers who observed Santino's stone-throwing over the course of a decade had not seen him gathering the stones, and thus could not know why he originally starting doing so. Santino, Shettleworth and some others argued, might have had some other reasons for caching the stones, and the stone throwing might have been an afterthought. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Evolution; Attention
Link ID: 16777 - Posted: 05.10.2012

By Laura Sanders A mysterious kind of nerve cell that has been linked to empathy, self-awareness, and even consciousness resides in Old World monkeys. The finding, published May 10 in Neuron, extends the domain of the neurons beyond humans, great apes and other large-brained creatures and will now allow scientists to study the habits of a neuron that may be key to human self-awareness. “People have been reluctant to say, but want to believe, that these neurons might be the neural correlate of consciousness,” says neuroscientist and psychiatrist Hugo Critchley of the University of Sussex in England. Finding the neurons in macaques, which can be studied in laboratories, “opens up the possibility to study directly the role of these cells,” he says. An earlier study saw no signs of the cells, called von Economo neurons, in macaques. But while carefully scrutinizing a small piece of a macaque brain for a different experiment, anatomist Henry Evrard of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, stumbled across the rare, distinctive cells. About three times bigger than other nerve cells, von Economo neurons have long, fat bodies and tufts of message-receiving dendrites at each end. Evrard compares the first sighting to seeing the tip of an iceberg. After many additional tests, he and his colleagues concluded that the cells, though smaller and sparser than their human counterparts, were indeed the elusive von Economo neurons. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 16776 - Posted: 05.10.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV Imagine being able to zoom into a human brain in extreme detail as you would navigate through Google Earth. This summer, a digital brain atlas being developed by neuroanatomist Jacopo Annese and his team from University of California, San Diego, will be available online, allowing people to interact with the brain's anatomy down to the level of the cell. The digital display is being created from slices of the brain of Henry Gustav Molaison, who lost his ability to form new long-term memories after a brain operation to treat epilepsy. By working with his brain, the team are building a 3D model in much higher resolution than is possible from MRI scans. To prepare a brain for dissection, it is first preserved in a process that takes months and then frozen. Next it is placed in a motorised tissue slicer specially built by Annese and his team to accommodate an organ as big as the brain (see video). A blade peels away layers about as thick as a human hair, which look like super-thin slices of prosciutto. They are collected with a paintbrush and placed in a salty solution. The sections are then laid out on glass slides so that they can be stained once dry. The purple dye used in the video stains genetic material in each cell, making fine anatomical structures visible. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 16775 - Posted: 05.10.2012

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR A new study has found that consumption of omega-3 fatty acids, plentiful in fish and nuts, is associated with lower blood levels of beta-amyloid protein. Amyloid plaques and tangles in the brain are characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease and are known to increase the risk for mental decline; blood levels of the protein may reflect levels of its deposits in the brain. Researchers studied 1,219 mentally healthy people over 65, recording their diet over one and a half years and testing their blood for beta-amyloid and for vitamins and other nutrients. The study appeared online last week in Neurology. None of the nutrients was associated with reduced beta-amyloid levels except for omega-3 fatty acid. After controlling for age, education, ethnicity, alcohol intake and apolipoprotein E genotype (a genetic marker for dementia risk), the scientists found that higher levels of omega-3 intake were associated with significantly lower beta-amyloid blood levels. The subjects got their omega-3 mainly from fish, poultry, margarine and nuts, but Dr. Nikolaos Scarmeas, the senior author, was unwilling to offer diet advice. “The aim of this study is to try and confirm or disprove mechanisms by which omega-3 may affect brain function,” he said. “But it is not intended to derive public health recommendations.” Dr. Scarmeas is an associate professor of clinical neurology at Columbia University. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16774 - Posted: 05.10.2012

A simple drawing test may help predict the risk of older men dying after a first stroke, a study in the journal BMJ Open suggests. Taken while healthy, the test involves drawing lines between numbers in ascending order as fast as possible. Men who scored in the bottom third were about three times as likely to die after a stroke compared with those who were in the highest third. The study looked at 1,000 men between the ages of 67 and 75 over 14 years. Of the 155 men who had a stroke, 22 died within a month and more than half within an average of two- and-a-half years. The researchers think that tests are able to pick up hidden damage to brain blood vessels when there are no other obvious signs or symptoms. Dr Clare Walton, from the Stroke Association, said: "This is an interesting study because it suggests there may be early changes in the brain that puts someone at a greater risk of having a fatal stroke. "This is a small study and the causes of poor ability on the drawing task is not known. Although much more research is needed, this task has the potential to screen for those most at risk of a severe or fatal stroke before it occurs so that they can benefit from preventative treatments." BBC © 2012

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 16773 - Posted: 05.10.2012

By Consumer Reports, Millions of Americans might be overusing sleeping pills, which can pose health risks, a recent analysis by Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs noted. Medication for insomnia can lead to side effects, dependency and even worse sleep problems when taken too often or in excessive doses. If you need help for short-term insomnia caused by travel or a stressful event, start with an over-the-counter sleep aid. If that doesn’t work, ask your doctor if you should try generic zolpidem. But everyone — especially those with chronic insomnia and people 55 or older — should first try these nondrug approaches: Lifestyle changes. Behavior modification — such as changing sleep habits by getting up at the same time every day and avoiding naps — produced significant improvements for older adults with chronic insomnia, according to a 2011 study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Cognitive-behavioral therapy. Seeing a therapist who specializes in insomnia might help 70 to 80 percent of people with chronic insomnia, often providing a “cure.” (Pills treat the symptoms.) To find a sleep center where CBT is offered, call the American Academy of Sleep Medicine at 630-737-9700 or go to www.sleepcenters.org. Ask your insurer about coverage. Exercise. A study of more than 3,000 adults, published in December in the journal Mental Health and Physical Activity, found that 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise, such as brisk walking, or 75 minutes a week of vigorous activity, such as running, improved sleep quality by as much as 65 percent. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 16772 - Posted: 05.10.2012