definition of insomnia – Layman Definition of Insomnia

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 2:52 pm

Definition of Insomnia

Insomnia is a medical term that generally refers to a symptom of sleeping disorders, in which the patient is having difficultly in maintaining or to sleep.

Definition of insomnia can be simplified into 3 main categories.

Unable to get to sleep. However, if sleep is attained, the patient will be having a deep sleep .
Able to get to sleep easily, but having difficulty in getting a well rest
Wakes up too early in the morning, after which, he is not able to get back to sleep

Information on Insomnia

Commonly, insomnia goes away by itself, usually lasting for a week or two. Should the sleeping disorder problem persist for at least 6 months, this is serious enough to be warranted as a chronic disease.

Having prolong period of unsatisfactory sleep is extremely unhealthy. Your mood, physical and mental health and social relationships will be affected.

In additional to chronic insomnia, usually the suffers will suffering from other diseases such as anxiety, depression or muscle aches.

Insomnia can happened when some events that has a great impact happened. Some instances will be unable to pay your housing loan or the passing of a loved one. Constant thoughts of the events increase brain activities and results in insomnia, which makes it hard for the suffer to sleep.

Or, as per definition of insomnia above, the events can even be replayed as nightmares which results in difficulty in getting a good night.

Interesting History of Insomnia

Insomnia is not a modern disease and the starting date was unknown. Many famous people have insomnia and used it to their advantage and some of them had thought of special methods to cure their sleeping disorder issues.

When Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens and Ben feel alert at night and are unable to sleep, they blame their beds for their lack of sleep.

Winston Churchill changed the bed he was sleeping on and solved his sleepless nights.

While Charles Dickens could only sleep if he was in a certain position. His bed had to face north and he would have to be exactly in the middle of his bed in order to have a blissful slumber.

For Benjamin Franklin, the bed would had to be cold enough for him to sleep. If the bed was too warm, he would get off his bed to allow air to cool it before trying to get into dreamland again.

Napoleon Bonaparte made full use of his inability to sleep to plan his invasions.

Learn about the reasons for insomnia here

Continue reading and know what causes insomnia at Know What Causes Insomnia website

Scanning invisible damage of PTSD, brain blasts - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON – Powerful scans are letting doctors watch just how the brain changes in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and concussion-like brain injuries — signature damage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

It's work that one day may allow far easier diagnosis for patients — civilian or military — who today struggle to get help for these largely invisible disorders. For now it brings a powerful message: Problems too often shrugged off as "just in your head" in fact do have physical signs, now that scientists are learning where and how to look for them.

"There's something different in your brain," explains Dr. Jasmeet Pannu Hayes of Boston University, who is helping to lead that research at the Veterans Affairs' National Center for PTSD. "Just putting a real physical marker there, saying that this is a real thing," encourages more people to seek care.

Up to one in five U.S. veterans from the long-running combat in Iraq and Afghanistan is thought to have symptoms of PTSD. An equal number are believed to have suffered traumatic brain injuries, or TBIs — most that don't involve open wounds but hidden damage caused by explosion's pressure wave.

Many of those TBIs are considered similar to a concussion, but because symptoms may not be apparent immediately, many soldiers are exposed multiple times, despite evidence from the sports world that damage can add up, especially if there's little time between assaults.

"My brain has been rattled," is how a recently retired Marine whom Hayes identifies only as Sgt. N described the 50 to 60 explosions he estimates he felt while part of an ordnance disposal unit.

Hayes studied the man in a new way, tracking how water flows through tiny, celery stalk-like nerve fibers in his brain — and found otherwise undetectable evidence that those fibers were damaged in a brain region that explained his memory problems and confusion.

It's a noninvasive technique called "diffusion tensor imaging" that merely adds a little time to a standard MRI scan. Water molecules constantly move, bumping into each other and then bouncing away. Measuring the direction and speed of that diffusion in nerve fibers can tell if the fibers are intact or damaged. Those fibers are sort of a highway along which the brain's cells communicate. The bigger the gaps, the more interrupted the brain's work becomes.

"Sgt. N's brain is very different," Hayes told a military medical meeting last week. "His connective tissue has been largely compromised."

There's a remarkable overlap of symptoms between those brain injuries and PTSD, says Dr. James Kelly, a University of Colorado neurologist tapped to lead the military's new National Intrepid Center of Excellence. It will open next year in Bethesda, Md., to treat both conditions.

Yes, headaches are a hallmark of TBI while the classic PTSD symptoms are flashbacks and nightmares. But both tend to cause memory and attention problems, anxiety, irritability, depression and insomnia. That means the two disorders share brain regions.

And Hayes can measure how some of those regions go awry in the vicious cycle that is PTSD, where patients feel like they're reliving a trauma instead of understanding that it's just a memory.

What happens? A brain processing system that includes the amygdala — the fear hot spot — becomes overactive. Other regions important for attention and memory, regions that usually moderate our response to fear, are tamped down.

"The good news is this neural signal is not permanent. It can change with treatment," Hayes says.

Her lab performed MRI scans while patients either tried to suppress their negative memories, or followed PTSD therapy and changed how they thought about their trauma. That fear-processing region quickly cooled down when people followed the PTSD therapy.

It's work that has implications far beyond the military: About a quarter of a million Americans will develop PTSD at some point in their lives. Anyone can develop it after a terrifying experience, from a car accident or hurricane to rape or child abuse.

More research is needed for the scans to be used in diagnosing either PTSD or a TBI. But some are getting close — like another MRI-based test that can spot lingering traces of iron left over from bleeding, thus signaling a healed TBI. If the brain was hit hard enough to bleed, then more delicate nerve pathways surely were damaged, too, Kelly notes.

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EDITOR'S NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.