These and other key sleep differences are highlighted in the next section. new review The result of ongoing research into sleep and gender, which will impact how sleep-related disorders are treated in women and men. The review by researchers from the University of Southampton, Stanford University, and Harvard University is published in Sleep Medicine Reviews.
“Depending on your gender, for example, you may need to receive a different type of treatment, a different type of medication, or a different dosage,” he said. Renske Rocka postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, led the review.
Estimation 50 million to 70 million Americans According to the National Institutes of Health, you have a chronic or ongoing sleep disorder.and 1 in 3 adults According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans are experiencing sleep deprivation.
Women say their sleep quality is poor
This review found that women tend to have poorer sleep quality than men. related Disorders associated with anxiety and depression.
Women have better sleep quality in terms of the amount of deep sleep and sleep duration as measured by brain activity. However, researchers found that women had far more complaints about insomnia than men.
“While women may be a little more open about the psychological effects and the facts of sleep deprivation, men are more likely to keep it to themselves,” Roque says.
a study It was not included in the review in 2021, but another reason was suggested. Researchers at Lausanne University Hospital looked at women’s sleep patterns to understand why women complain of waking up in the middle of the night, even though sleep indicators show they are getting enough sleep. investigated.
Researchers applied 256 brainwave, or EEG, electrodes to the scalp and face to get a deeper reading of brain activity during sleep. The women were then woken up at different times of the night and asked whether they felt asleep or awake.
As a result, women who feel like they are waking up frequently during the night, even though they appear to be asleep, experience high-frequency brain activity in a small part of their brain that is almost akin to wakefulness. It turns out that the remaining 95% occurs in a part of the brain. Their brains were at rest. This activity is not detected in standard sleep studies, where only a small number of electrodes are used.
“We found that even though 95 percent of the brain is at rest, there’s still some activity going on in this small part of the brain that makes us aware that we’re here, so we can understand what they’re feeling. “Now I can understand it,” he said. Raphael Heinzer, director of the Sleep Research Center at Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland, says: “We never make fun of patients, but we didn’t believe them.”
Women have faster circadian rhythms
Sleep disorders such as insomnia in women may also be due to the fact that their circadian rhythms are faster than men’s, meaning they tend to start their day a little earlier. A woman’s cycle is 24.09 hours, plus or minus 0.2 hours, while a man’s cycle is 24.19 hours, plus or minus 0.2 hours.
Although the differences may seem small, the cumulative effect over days, weeks, or months can create a misalignment between your body clock and external cues such as light and darkness, causing sleep disruption. There is a gender.
According to the researchers, women’s earlier cycles correspond to earlier release of melatonin and cortisol. Melatonin is a natural hormone that tells our body it’s time to sleep.
This finding is related to what was found in previous research, it said. Christian KajochenThe director of the Center for Chronobiology at the University of Basel was not involved in the review. For example, differences in circadian rhythms related to hormones secreted during puberty may explain the differences in sleep between young men and women.
After menstruation ends, girls start sleeping cumulatively 20 minutes later each year until they reach their early 20s, just as they are finishing puberty.
Men experience a similar phenomenon in their teens, but it doesn’t end until their late 20s, said Kajochen, whose research includes age-related changes in the circadian regulation of sleep.
As children go to bed and wake up, there is a turning point where they go “late, late, late, late” and that is the end of adolescence. And this happens later in men than in women,” Kajochen said. “When I look at the kids, they are starting to get older again, which gives me hope that adolescence is over.”
Risk of sleep apnea and type 2 diabetes in men
The review found that men are three times more likely to develop sleep apnea and are more susceptible to sleep apnea due to the structure of their upper airways. health problems High blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, etc.
The review also found that men are more likely to overeat than women when they’re sleep deprived. Additionally, both men and women are at higher risk for type 2 diabetes among shift workers, whose irregular schedules may cause them to lack sleep and disrupt their natural circadian rhythms, but men are at greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes. was much higher. the researchers pointed out.
Gender differences matter
Because of these important health implications, researchers say we need a better understanding of sex differences in sleep and circadian biology. However, historically, biomedical studies on sleep have not even included women, believing that hormonal phenomena such as menstruation and menopause present so many confounding variables that the studies are useless. Roque said this was because he had been exposed.
When women are included, researchers typically use only women who are in the same stage of their menstrual cycle or who are taking oral contraceptives to suppress normal ovarian cycles.
Roque says the general consensus is that sleep patterns are essentially gender-neutral. However, new research shows that there are clear differences in sleep quality, duration, and latency between men and women, and that these differences may be due to differences in their circadian rhythms and associated changes in core body temperature, melatonin levels, etc. It has been shown that it may be caused by physiological changes. , she said.
“Women in general have just been excluded,” Locke said. “And while it has been more or less assumed that the results found in men also apply to women, we are now increasingly understanding that that is not entirely true.”
