How to Rise and Shine on Less Sleep

If holiday parties and marathon shopping are leaving a yawning gap in your sleep schedule, take heart: You may not be able to snooze as long as you would like each night, but you can learn to sleep smarter.

Suppose you normally sleep from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., but you can only squeeze in five hours of shut-eye.

Go to bed later--say, 2 a.m.--and then get up at the regular time, suggests Dr. German Nino-Murcia, director of Stanford University Sleep Disorders Clinic. That’s smarter than fighting to stay awake until 4 or 5 a.m., then sleeping in until 9 a.m. or later.

“Getting up at the regular time keeps your body clock set in the same manner every day,” said Michael Stevenson, a psychologist and clinical director of the North Valley Sleep Disorders Center, Mission Hills.

Early to bed, earlier to rise isn’t a good idea either, Stevenson said.

“If you get up earlier (than normal), you get deprived of rapid eye movement or dreaming sleep, most of which occurs the last third of the night.”

Too little REM sleep can make you feel even sleepier, Stevenson said, and more prone to nightmares or intense dreaming.

Other wise moves for the seasonally sleep-deprived: Stop drinking coffee six or seven hours before you plan to go to bed--but if you can’t, be aware that the longer you stay up, the less effect caffeine will have on sleep.

If you know you’ll stay up late, consider a 30-90 minute nap in the afternoon.

New Prostate Procedure

A new, nonsurgical technique to treat enlargement of the prostate gland--a condition that affects up to 75% of men older than 50--reportedly can be done on an outpatient basis at a quarter the cost of traditional surgery. Enlargement of the prostate, the muscular gland surrounding the urethra at the base of the bladder, can result in frequent or difficult urination, bladder infection and kidney damage, according to Dr. Flavio Castaneda of the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis, who has pioneered the new technique. When symptoms become severe, the usual recommendation is a surgical procedure called transurethral resection of the prostate, in which an electric cutting device is inserted through the penis to trim away excess prostate tissue. The surgery usually requires general or spinal block anesthesia, three days hospitalization and several weeks recovery time.

In the new, half-hour procedure, done with local anesthetic and sedation, a tube with a balloon tip is inserted through the penis into the affected portion of the urethra and then inflated to open the channel, said Dr. Cesar Ercole, an instructor of urology at the University of Minnesota Medical School and a co-researcher with Castaneda. Recovery time averages one week, he said.

Based on a study of 60 patients, the balloon procedure was 75% successful in those with enlargement of the side lobes, the most common type of enlargement, and 25% successful in those with the less common condition of middle lobe enlargement, Castaneda told colleagues attending a recent meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

Still, it’s not for everyone. Those with large prostate glands may not be candidates, Ercole said. And it doesn’t last as long as transurethral resection, he said, so patients may need to resort to surgery eventually.

Illness and Personality

Children with hard-driving Type-A personalities tend to complain less about physical problems than easier-going children with Type-B personalities, Canadian researchers say, noting that these behavior patterns mimic those found in adults.

Type-B children are also more likely to undergo tonsillectomies, possibly because they mention symptoms like sore throats more frequently, said Patrick McGrath, a senior psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, Ottawa. With two co-researchers, McGrath studied 85 children who underwent tonsil and adenoid surgery, assessing their personality types, their symptom-reporting behavior and their previous illness history. Type-A children, for example, missed an average of 6.5 days of school after surgery and Type-B children missed 7.75 days, even though there were no differences in school attendance before surgery.

The practical implications for parents? “Children are different in the extent they report symptoms,” said McGrath, “and those differences are in part due to personality.”