Anxiety Linked To Sleep Disturbances

Anxiety from stressful life situations increases the likelihood of sleep disturbances, according to new research.

The study, undertaken by the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and published in the journal SLEEP, discovered that a combination liability to anxiety and exposure to stressful life events increased the chance of sleep disturbance in both men and women.

A measurement of each person's liability to anxiety, as determined by a general feeling of stressfulness and symptoms of hyperactivity, was assessed at the onset. The occurrence of post-onset life events (i.e., death or illness in the family, divorce, financial difficulty and violence) and sleep disturbances was measured at follow-up five years later.

According to study results, both liability to anxiety and exposure to negative life events were strongly linked with sleep disturbances. Among the men liable to anxiety, the odds of sleep disturbances were 3.11 times higher for those who had experienced a severe life event within six months than for the others.

"This five-year follow-up showed that exposure to severe stressful events can trigger sleep disturbances in people with undisturbed sleep before the event. Those liable to anxiety before the event seemed to be at a higher risk of post-event sleep disturbances compared with those not liable to anxiety. The strength of this study is a study design that allowed the timing of pre-event predisposing traits and the occurrence of specific stressful events precipitating the onset of sleep disturbances. Control for a large number of potential confounding factors suggest that the observed associations were not explained by socioeconomic position, obesity, high alcohol intake or chronic medical conditions at study entry," said Dr. Vahtera.

Experts recommend that adults get seven to eight hours of sleep each night for good health and optimum performance. Adolescents should sleep about nine hours a night, school-aged children between 10-11 hours a night and children in pre-school between 11-13 hours a night.

Those who think they might have a sleep disorder are urged to discuss their problem with their primary care physician or a sleep specialist.

Ripe Fruit Contains Highly Active Antioxidants

A new study has found that ripening fruits contain highly active antioxidants, and thus are very healthy to eat

The breakdown of chlorophyll in ripening apples and pears produces the same decomposition products as those in brightly-colored leaves. These colorless decomposition products are highly active antioxidants.

A team led by Bernhard Kräutler at the University of Innsbruck has now determined that the breakdown of chlorophyll in ripening apples and pears produces the same decomposition products as those in brightly coloured leaves.

The beautifully colored leaves of fall are a sign of leaf senescence, the programmed cell death in plants. This process causes the disappearance of chlorophyll, which is what gives leaves their green colour

Unripe fruits are green because of their chlorphyll. In ripe fruits, NCCs have replaced the chlorophyll, especially in the peel and the flesh immediately below it.

These catabolytes are the same for apples and pears, and are also the same as those found in the leaves of the fruit trees.

"There is clearly one biochemical pathway for chlorophyll decomposition in leaf senescence and fruit ripening,” concludes Kräutler.

When chlorophyll is released from its protein complexes in the decomposition process, it has a phototoxic effect: When irradiated with light, it absorbs energy and can transfer it to other substances.

For example, it can transform oxygen into a highly reactive, destructive form.

As the researchers were able to demonstrate, the NCCs have an opposite effect: They are powerful antioxidants and can thus play an important physiological role for the plant.

It then became apparent that NCCs are components of the diets of humans and other higher animals, and that they could thus also play a role in their systems.

Other previously identified important antioxidants in the peels of fruits include the flavonoids. Thus, the saying, "an apple a day keeps the doctor away” seems to be true, according to Kräutler.

Garlic-Good For Heart

Garlic lovers, take heart: The pungent root may promote healthier responses in blood vessels.
But how you take your garlic matters, the research showed. "If you prepare it in certain ways, you can lose the compounds that cause it to release hydrogen sulfide, so that helps explain why there has been such great variability in studies," noted senior researcher David Kraus, an associate professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.

In the array of garlic health studies, more than half have shown some positive effect, but that effect has tended to be small, and some trials have even shown negative health effects, Kraus noted. Some of his team's experiments used juice extracted from supermarket garlic. Human red blood cells exposed to tiny amounts of the juice began emitting hydrogen sulfide.


When working with garlic, Kraus first crushes the clove. He then waits for the reaction that produces the compounds that trigger hydrogen sulfide release. "We usually let the garlic crush for 15 minutes," he said.

Other studies of garlic's health effects have failed, Kraus said, because they look for activity that is impossible -- a reduction in blood cholesterol levels, for example. One such trial was done by Christopher D. Gardner, a nutrition scientist and assistant professor at Stanford University's Prevention Research Center in California.

"We used real raw garlic and two commercial supplements in doses higher than people are advised to take," Gardner noted. "We assumed that at least one of the three would work. These were people whose LDL ['bad'] cholesterol was elevated. We worked with 192 people for six months, and they [LDL cholesterol levels] didn't budge, not even a bit, month after month."
According to Gardner, Kraus' work now offers a reason for that failure, because hydrogen sulfide has no effect on cholesterol.

Eric Block, professor of chemistry at the State University of New York, Albany, has also done extensive work on garlic. He called the paper "provocative" but expressed some concerns.
For example, he said, "the benefits of garlic on cardiovascular disease remain controversial, because they have not been established by the gold standard method of placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical studies," he said.

It's also uncertain that garlic's purported beneficial effects are due to the mechanism described in the new report, Block added. Clinical trials are needed to help prove that point, he said.
According to Block, Kraus' team, "should be more conservative in over-extending some of their conclusions in the absence of additional work." However, "their work does represent a significant advance in the science of this amazing, ancient, ever-popular herb," he said.

Kraus stressed that his study only looked at the effect of fresh garlic, not garlic supplements. "What we are proposing is that you eat a garlic-rich diet," he said. "We haven't really tried to look at supplements yet."