Did you know that sleep has a lot to do with your telomere length? It does. In
fact, sleep has been associated with a lot of things that should drive health
and longevity. Chronic sleep loss has been associated with Alzheimer's, cancer,
diabetes. In fact, with diabetes, you have a bad night of sleep and you have
insulin resistance the next two days. Any guess what that might be? May be cortisol.
Depression, immune dysfunction, hypertension... all of these things are
associated with chronic sleep loss. Telomere shortening has also been
associated with shortened lifespan, and sleep loss has been
associated with telomere shortening. Even short-term sleep loss has been
associated with decreased gene expressions. In terms of healthy genes
and biomarkers, here's one of the studies. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences. "Effects of Insufficient Sleep on Circadian
Rhythmicity and Expression Amplitude of the Human Blood
Transcriptome." Again, what they're showing is we change the genes that we express
based on how well we sleep. Here's another one. "Short Sleep Duration
Is Associated with Shorter Telomere Length in Healthy Men: Findings from the
Whitehall II Cohort Study." What is a telomere anyway? It's the end cap on a
chromosome, and it has something to do with the chroma. Our body's ability and
the chromosome's ability to find specific gene locations pull that gene out and
actually translate that gene into RNA and then RNA and proteins, genes, enzymes,
things like that. The shorter your telomere, the shorter you're predicted...
projected lifespan. Here's another one in Oxford Sleep. "Association Between Snoring
and Leukocyte Telomere Length." Well now, wait a minute. We thought we were talking
about sleep. Snoring is the ultimate Jack the Ripper's hiding behind all so many
of us. We don't realize when we're asleep... people that have sleep disordered
breathing - sleep apnea... you may notice that you wake up, but you don't notice
what woke you up quite often. It was snoring or sleep apnea or sleep
disordered breathing. All the same thing. And what that's doing is waking you up.
When you're trying to... your body is trying to reconstruct and restore
hormone levels for important hormones (like lower levels of cortisol) continue
to get interrupted with sleep disorders, and you continue to have neck
of impacts on your health. If you haven't read this book, a little bit foggy
looking, sorry about that... it's actually... this is not a book... this is a video by
Matt Walker, "Secrets of the Sleeping Brain." He covers a lot of this telomere
length and sleep issue. The book I was remembering is also by Matt Walker, it's
"Why We Sleep." Excellent book. If you made it this far, thank you for your interest.
This is Ford Brewer. I started off my career as an ER doc. And that can be frustrating
because most of the things bringing patients into the ER can and should be
prevented, like heart attack and stroke. So I went to Johns Hopkins for training
in prevention. Did well, ended up running the program, trained dozens of docs
there, and have trained hundreds and even over a thousand doctors since then in
preventing disease. What's even more important is I've helped thousands of
patients prevent heart attack at stroke rather than waiting for the devastation
and hoping for a cure.