Smartphones’ Blue Light May Lead To Weight Gain As A Result Of Poor Sleep

You already know the blue light that emits from your smartphone disrupts production of the sleep hormone melatonin. And as research continues to strengthen the association between sleep deprivation and obesity, it was only a matter of time before a studyfound smartphones might make people fat, too. Yes, that time is now.

Scientists at the University of Granada in Spain injected rats with melatonin and found regulating this hormone helped to combat obesity and diabetes. Their animal research is similar to research being done at Manchester University, where the effects of regular sleep patterns are being monitored in patients with diabetes. Dr. Simon Kyle, a sleep researcher at the University’s School of Psychological Sciences and on the team at MU, said that while the work is ongoing, they’ve found a link between circadian patterns (a person’s internal clock) and disease.

“We are interested in how an alteration in the sleep-wake pattern may be involved in the onset of diabetes and obesity and if, when you improve the timing of sleep you can also have a positive effect on conditions like diabetes and obesity,” Kyle said in a press release.

The timing of sleep doesn’t only mean a regular, healthy dose of melatonin; it also means a regular, healthy dose of ghrelin and leptin, the hunger hormones. Without sleep, these hormones can be altered, skewing a person’s appetite and encouraging them to overconsume high-calorie foods. Consuming more of these increases risk for belly fat, which then increases risk for diabetes. It’s all one viciously hungry cycle.

Though, this isn’t the first time off-balance hormones and circadian patterns, orrhythms, have posed a threat to our health. Disrupted patterns (a result from when we miss the external signals and clues the sun is up or down) increases riskfor metabolic syndrome and fatty liver. Our body being able to tell when the sun is rising and setting, or when it’s time to wake-up versus sleep, keeps it on an even, healthy keel.

Yet, most people are in the habit of charging their phones, tablets, any other gadget of choice in their bedrooms, be it physically in bed (hey, no shame in maximizing your space) or nearby on a nightstand. Even if you made a point to turn off all devices a while before bed, the light from a late-night message or notification can still disrupt melatonin secretion, “and that could contribute to alterations in metabolism,” Kyle said.

A better idea is to charge your phone in another room. And, as always, sleep with as little light as possible. Pitch-black conditions reset your internal clock, helping you get up and eat at the right times.

The third state of consciousness under the knife

Having a general anaesthetic is a routine part of many operations. But what happens if you are still conscious after you close your eyes?

You are in the operating theatre. Anaesthetic has been administered and the countdown to unconsciousness begins.

For most people, the next thing they will remember is being roused from a deep sleep.

But in a small minority of cases, complete unconsciousness never comes.

Being awake during surgery and not being able to do anything about it is every patient’s worst nightmare.

But according to one of the country’s leading anaesthetists, it may not be as simple as saying that someone is either asleep or awake.

Prof Jaideep Pandit, consultant anaesthetist at the Oxford University Hospitals, believes there is an alternative “third state” of consciousness somewhere between sleeping and waking that patients under general anaesthetic can and do experience.

“I call it dysanaesthesia,” he explains. “A type of awareness where the patient is aware of the surgery but is neither conscious nor unconscious.”

A third dimension of consciousness

Despite being used around the world on a daily basis, no-one is exactly sure how a general anaesthetic acts upon the body.

Anaesthesia is a complicated business requiring many years of training and a proper understanding of which drugs to give, and how much.

However in general, a patient can be expected to receive an anaesthetic to make them unconscious and a painkiller to numb the pain.

A specialist doctor will then monitor a whole host of measurements throughout the operation to make sure that the patient really is out for the count.

Even so, in an estimated 1 in 15,000 surgeries patients experience what is known as accidental awareness where they remember aspects of their surgery after waking. Around a third of those will feel pain.

The question whether someone is conscious or not is mind-bogglingly complex.

But Professor Pandit is investigating something that goes one step further – a twilight state that lies between conscious and unconscious states – and one that his experiments show happens much more frequently than accidental awareness.

He has been able to show this through the use of something known as the Isolated Forearm Technique.

The patient is aware of the surgery but is neither conscious nor unconscious.”

Professor Jaideep Pandit Oxford University Hospitals

Before the advent of carefully calibrated monitoring equipment, anaesthetists were able to use this technique during surgery to check whether someone was fully unconscious.

The method uses a tourniquet to prevent any muscle relaxants from paralysing the forearm. This means that if the patient becomes conscious during surgery, they can move their arm to alert the surgeon.

Professor Pandit has used the technique to show some fascinating aspects to human awareness.

In repeated tests, one third of patients who are seemingly unconscious are able to squeeze the experimenter’s fingers on command using their non-paralysed forearm. But none of them will move spontaneously to show that they are awake or in pain during surgery.

“To all extents and purposes, these patients are unconscious,” says Prof Pandit. “But they are clearly in a state where they can respond to some stimuli like verbal commands but not to others like the surgery, possibly because they are not distressed by it.”

According to Prof Pandit, this suggests there is a third level of consciousness.

But analysing the concept remains extremely difficult.

“Mainly when patients come round they will have no recall of the event or if they do they do it’s just vague memories. They’re unable to remember anything with clarity,” he told the BBC.

Still a mystery

One way doctors frequently explain general anaesthesia to patients is to compare it to being asleep. But that is technically inaccurate says Dr Emory Brown, a professor of anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School.

“What we need to do to safely and humanely operate on you – to perform a procedure which is indeed, very invasive and certainly traumatic – is to put you in a state which is a coma that we can readily reverse,” he told the BBC.

This coma-like condition potentially protects the patient from pain and memory of the surgery. But it also helps the surgeons to operate by keeping the patient still and maintaining bodily functions at a stable level.

However, what’s happening in the brain as it slips from conscious into unconsciousness is still uncertain.

In 2011, a research team at Manchester University were able to watch for the first time the effects on a human brain as it lost consciousness under anaesthetic.

Using a novel method of brain imaging, they were able to construct real-time 3D images of the brain – rather than the 2D slices of standard brain scans.

It enabled them to see how electrical activity in the brain changed as the patients went under.

Interestingly, activity in the brain appeared to hot up as the patient became unconscious. This suggests that rather than switching off, the brain works hard to dampen down or inhibit consciousness while they are under the influence of anaesthetic.

But scientists are still a long way off from understanding the impact on the brain as unconsciousness occurs.

Pain and Trauma

“We are still unable at this time to define what human consciousness is, so trying to find a box of tricks that’s going to monitor its absence is difficult,” says Dr Kevin Fong, a consultant in anaesthesia at University College London Hospitals.

“But awareness during anaesthesia is something we’ve learnt to guard against through layers and layers of monitoring. We check surrogates of awareness such as heart rate, blood pressure and rates of respiration, and also constantly monitor the exact concentration of drugs in the blood.”

Indeed having memory of your surgery is one of the most important complications that both anaesthetists and patients wish to avoid.

Although a national survey this year found the risk of waking up under the knife was extremely low, the effects for patients who do experience it can be acutely traumatic.

For Prof Pandit, the ultimate aim of understanding human unconsciousness is to prevent such episodes from occurring.

“The risk of experiencing pain or distress during accidental awareness is very low at around 1 in 45,000,” he explains. “But when it does happen it can have a very bad effect on the individual.”

“So it’s not just the numbers that are driving us to research dysanaesthesia, but also the impact.”

The drugs used to take you under..

• Anaesthetics are drugs that cause unconsciousness. They do not prevent a patient from feeling pain or paralyse their muscles. They can be delivered through either an injection or through gas.
• Analgesics are painkillers. These are needed to make sure that the patient doesn’t experience pain either during the operation or for a short time afterwards.
• Muscle relaxants are used to help paralyse the patient. However, they are not used in all forms of surgery. It is possible to fix a broken wrist, for example, without paralysis.

Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing to be given posthumous pardon.

Government indicates support for backbench bill to pardon mathematician who took his own life after indecency case

Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker who took his own life after being convicted of gross indecency under anti-homosexuality legislation, is to be given a posthumous pardon.

The government signalled on Friday that it is prepared to support a backbench bill that would pardon Turing, who died from cyanide poisoning at the age of 41 in 1954 after he was subjected to “chemical castration”.

Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, a government whip, told peers that the government would table the third reading of the Alan Turing (statutory pardon) bill at the end of October if no amendments are made. “If nobody tables an amendment to this bill, its supporters can be assured that it will have speedy passage to the House of Commons,” Ahmad said.

The announcement marks a change of heart by the government, which declined last year to grant pardons to the 49,000 gay men, now dead, who were convicted under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act. They include Oscar Wilde.

Ahmad told peers: “Alan Turing himself believed that homosexual activity would be made legal by a royal commission. In fact, appropriately, it was parliament which decriminalised the activity for which he was convicted. The government are very aware of the calls to pardon Turing, given his outstanding achievements, and have great sympathy with this objective … That is why the government believe it is right that parliament should be free to respond to this bill in whatever way its conscience dictates and in whatever way it so wills.”

The government threw its weight behind the private member’s bill, promoted by the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Sharkey, after a debate that featured a contribution from a peer who worked at Bletchley Park. Lady Trumpington told peers: “The block I worked in was devoted to German naval codes. Only once was I asked to deliver a paper to Alan Turing, so … I cannot claim that I knew him. However, I am certain that but for his work we would have lost the war through starvation.”

Turing broke German ciphers using the bombe method, which allowed the code-breakers to crack the German Enigma code. His colleague Tommy Flowers built the Colossus computer. Ahmad described Turing as “one of the fathers, if not the father, of computer science”.

Sharkey has campaigned for a pardon after being taught mathematics at Manchester University in the 1960s by Robin Gandy, Turing’s only doctoral student, who became a close friend and was the executor of his will.

Sharkey said: “As I think everybody knows, he was convicted in 1952 of gross indecency and sentenced to chemical castration. He committed suicide two years later. The government know that Turing was a hero and a very great man. They acknowledge that he was cruelly treated. They must have seen the esteem in which he is held here and around the world.”

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk