These are the items found in ‘bedkits’ that are distributed by Sleeping Children Around the World to kids in 31 developing countries.

This year, the Canadian charity has helped its millionth child get a better night’s sleep despite the harsh conditions he or she lives in.

I’d like to think that the strong support it gets from Canadian donors translates into a national belief in the importance of sleep.

Finally, sleep climbs the healthcare ladder!

Sleeping Children Around the World has a unique approach to improve sleep, which as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, is linked to certain health factors.

But why bedkits?

The premise of Sleeping Children Around the World is very simple. Its founder, Murray Dryden believed that a safe, good night sleep is a basic right that every child should have.

“Murray Dryden knew how vital a few hours of comfort and sleep could be to help one forget the extremes of temperature, the hopelessness, the sickness, and the pangs of hunger” —www.scaw.org

With that founding principle, Dryden’s charity has raised over $20 million for bedkits since 1970. Each kit costs about CND$35 and is made in the country where it will be distributed.

It’s a noble act that’s outlived Murray Dryden. His descendants are now carrying the torch. In two weeks ‘Team Dryden’ will set forth on a trip to the orphanage in Pune, India that inspired Murray to start the charity.

And while some critics might say that the money would be better spent on food or prescription drugs, bedkits are just one example of the measures that need to be taken to relieve world poverty.

Here’s to Team Dryden.

How much sleep they’re getting will affect their judgement, attention to detail, and possibly, their ability to provide a proper diagnosis.

I have enough trouble getting my things in the morning on less than six hours of sleep. I imagine it would be challenging to give advice, prescribe medication, and fulfill all the duties of a healthcare professional when one is sleep deprived.

But doctors, and residents in particular, are known to work ridiculously long shifts. They may have worked as long as 24 hours without a break before making it to your bedside.

A study by the UBC Sleep Disorder Clinic published in British Columbia Medical Journal has found that a lack of sleep could negatively affect the care one will receive from a physician. It also added that physicians that are sleep deprived are at a greater risk of being in a car crash, having hospital-related injuries and having compromised mental health.

Doctors in Canada are writing millions of prescriptions for sleep medication every year, but are they addressing their own sleep issues adequately?

Perhaps we should consider legislating the maximum hours a doctor is allowed to work. This could be one way to ensure quality of patient care and the longevity of our doctors (as we have such a shortage in Canada).

This was certainly an considered in a story on patient safety in Ergonomics Today that cited a recent British study that found that doctors made 33% fewer errors if they had more sleep.

But in a story on the same study in the BBC News, the participating doctors complained that fewer hours would have a negative impact on their learning opportunities. They also said that it decreased ‘patient continuity’, in other words, a doctor couldn’t stay long enough with one patient and this would hurt the patient’s care.

Before going under the knife, I’d sure like to have a well-rested surgeon who’s had their breakfast, and maybe even gone for a morning run. That might be possible in a privatized healthcare system. And there’s no way I’d wish that on Canadians.

When I first started Insomniac, I had two friends tell me that they had a sleep disorder that caused them to stop breathing.

‘You…you actually stop breathing?’, I asked incredulously.

I had heard of sleep apnea, but I  didn’t know much about it.

So since there’s been a surge of research on sleep apnea, I want to focus this post on making sense of it all.

I was totally unaware that sleep apnea is a very common sleep disorder. It affects nearly 18 million Americans. Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a condition where a person struggles to breath (or stops breathing altogether) because of a blocked upper airway.

This happens in cycles throughout the night.

It’s not easy to test for OSA. It requires an over-night hospital stay. But new research from the University of Sydney could make detection as simple as looking for certain features in a person’s face.

They only tried their new method on 180 patients, so beware of bad science…

Perhaps a more rigorous study from John Hopkins University Hospital, published in the February issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, showed that factors that have long been tied to obesity are also independently linked to sleep apnea.

Before I move on, it’s useful to know that sleep and weight have been known to affect each other. A dietician from Toronto, writing in the National Post, put it quite simply in her story on sleep as a tool to lose weight.

Basically, leptin and ghrelin, two hormones that regulate weight and appetite, are also affected by sleep. When you lose sleep your body produces more ghrelin, which is responsible for making you feel hungry. Your levels of leptin, the hormone that makes you feel full, will fall.

And we know that being overweight as an adult makes you more likely to develop type two diabetes, especially if you’re obese.

From that we can gather that sleep, weight and type two diabetes may be connected. The team at John Hopkins found that sleep apnea is indeed, linked to insulin resistance, lower levels of activity, and liver disease.

It’s important to note that the study found that these factors were linked to sleep apnea regardless of peoples’ weight. But we know that those factors are also liked to obesity, so there’s some interaction between the two.

Another recent study from the University of Toronto showed that inactivity could be independently linked to sleep apnea and could help explain why 40% of people with the disorder are not obese.

The study found that fluids which naturally accumulate in the legs when you’re sitting or standing could shift to the upper body when you lie down at night and that this could play a role in sleep apnea.

It seems like the more time you spend sitting i.e. the more sedentary your lifestyle, the greater the shift and the more likely it will affect your breathing.

If you haven’t tired of reading about studies, here’s one more.

I was shocked to read that people with sleep apnea are three times more likely to die of stroke, according to a Yale University study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology.

The Yale team found that people with OSA have a decreased ability to naturally protect their brains from stroke. This is explained by the fact that the brain swells in response to decreased levels of oxygen, which can happen when a person stops breathing.

Since people with OSA stop breathing repeatedly throughout the night, the brain ‘gets tired’ and is unable to properly control blood flow. This, I assume, makes one more susceptible to stroke.

So what should I tell my friends with sleep apnea?

A closer look at the studies I’ve just mention, might reveal some methodological problem that will let you say ‘Aha! It’s not true!’.

But since most of us aren’t experts, we trust what we read in the news.

This headline from the BBC News website made me look down in to my cup of coffee and wonder whether I really needed to drink the rest.

The research findings were splashed all over major daily newspapers in the UK and probably had the same effect on that nation’s tea drinkers.

But the study’s conclusions may have been overstated.

That’s good news for insomniacs and people who have problems falling asleep, staying asleep or generally don’t get ‘good’ sleep. I wanted to look into it a bit more because news like this can really affect our behaviour—especially for those that are desperate to break the sleepless cycle.

Maybe those three cups of coffee were what we really needed to get through a day at work after yet another night with no sleep.

The paranoia that we might actually be making things worse for ourselves can be enough for us to blindly heed the advice in daily news reports.

I have to thank Ben Goldacre for bringing the shortcomings of the study to the front of the Guardian’s science section.

Goldacre points to many problems in how the study was carried out. But for the sake of time and space, I’ll keep it to the basic issue.

After a little investigation, Goldacre found that the meat of the scientists’ press release was not anywhere to be found in the original paper. The three times greater risk that heavy coffee drinkers have of experiencing hallucinations was not published in the journal of Personality and Individual Differences.

This means that their fabulous claim, the one that made headlines, was not given the stamp of approval from the scientific community. In fact, it was an ‘ad hoc’ conclusion. This is basically where scientists come up with a conveniently simple way to explain their results—and garner media attention—after they’ve finished their experiement.

Most of us don’t have the time to call the scientist whose research has been manipulated (by the media or by themselves) to boost sales or bolster reputation.

What can you do? Send Ben an email and hope your concern is addressed in his ‘Bad Science’ column.

I think it’s safe to say that you shouldn’t be scared of drinking coffee to keep you awake and help you be more productive if you’ve lost some sleep. You probably won’t see little green men.

Just don’t spend twelve hours at the library.

But we don’t do it. It’s not a priority. There are a million other things that have to be done first, so we tell ourselves.

I’d like to make a case for pushing sleep to the top of your priority list. I’m talking about getting more deep, undisrupted, restorative sleep.

Here are the top 5 reasons to get the good stuff

(5) Cut back on caffeine and the voices will stop

To all the students: you know what I’m talking about. Caffeinated drinks like coffee and tea, those wonders that keep us going, are bad for sleep. Caffeine increases your response to stress because cortisol, a stress hormone, is in part, regulated by caffeine. This applies mainly to hard-core coffee and tea drinkers. But now there’s an added reason to cut back on trips to Timmy’s.

A recent study has found that people who drink more than seven cups of coffee a day are more likely to hallucinate. When you start hearing voices at the library it might be because you drank too much coffee. Or maybe it’s because you’ve been there for 12 hours.

It’s easy math. You’ll hit two birds with one stone if you drop your caffeine intake. Not only will those late-night library freak-out sessions stop, you’ll probably sleep better too.

(4) Sleep because you can. Some people who can’t, die

I don’t mean to be alarmist. I’m trying to cultivate a greater appreciation for sleep. It’s something we neglect and disregard, until one night, we can’t. I came across a story on sleep disorders that I found surprising.

You can die from lack of sleep.

These disorders are rare (I can’t emphasis that more) and come with disturbing names such as ‘Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome’. It seems to afflict South East Asian refugees for unclear reasons. Fatal Familial Insomnia is a genetic disease, for which these is no known cure, ends in death seven months to three years after onset.

(3) You’ll accomplish more in your day

Needless to say, poor sleep will affect your productivity. I can’t count the number of times I’ve gotten up in the wee hours, turned on the T.V. and watched re-runs of Friends. Friends isn’t funny. I’d rather see a miniature horse ride a car, eat a burger and fetch a cold beer. But you’ll regret it the next day when your boss is on your case for being sluggish.

(2) It’s a positive step towards losing weight

For those of you with a sweet-tooth, your indulgence in delectable chocolates may keep you from stepping on the scale. Who knows what you’ll see.

You might not have to cut chocolate out entirely, but you should at least stop eating it before bed. A story in the New York Times reports that chocolate can disrupt sleep. Dark chocolate in particular, contains caffeine and other stimulants that can keep you up at night.

(1) Sleep protects against the common cold

Finally, there’s evidence that poor sleep makes one more susceptible to colds.

Recent research has shown that getting less than seven or eight hours of restful sleep makes you three times more likely to catch a cold.

What’s worse, the scientists found that if you have poor quality sleep (defined as spending less than 92% of your time in bed actually sleeping) then you’re five and half times more likely to come down with a cold.

So it’s the combined factors of sleep quality, and quantity, that can affect your immune system’s response to a viral attack.

I spent just about half of my Christmas holiday in bed, stricken by a horrible snot- and fever- inducing virus. I chuckle when I think that I could have avoided it by sleeping longer and better. Ironically, isn’t that what the holidays are supposed to be about?

Is this true? If it is, what are the implications?

Bioethical questions are running circles in my brain. My quality of sleep has gone down. Flipping the switch—turning my brain off—has been a struggle.

It started when I read a recent story about a British baby girl born without BRCA1, a gene linked to breast cancer. The parents, using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, were able to select an embryo that didn’t have the fatal BRCA1 gene.

In my mind, online and in print, the designer baby debate was re-ignited.

Before my brain had dealt with the backlog of information/decisions that had piled up from the holidays, science hit again.

This time it was with new research emerging from the lab of Simon Baron-Cohen, developmental psychologist at the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. Baron-Cohen had found that fetuses exposed to high levels of testosterone in the womb were more likely to develop autistic traits.

What does this mean?

Baron-Cohen said it supported his ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism, since testosterone has been associated with some male cognitive abilities. Others in the scientific community rejected the claim that fetal testosterone is linked to autistic cognitive traits. Baron-Cohen has called for a public debate over the implications of a screening test for autism.

So who’s right?

A consensus hasn’t been reached, but like wildfire, stories have spread on a possible screening test for autism. The Guardian health editor, Sarah Boseley, talked about such a possibility and its implications in an interview this past Monday.

On the Guardian’s science blog, James Randerson suggested that if a pre-natal test for autism were available, future geniuses would be aborted. Not a genius, but certainly autistic, Anya Ustaszewski’s comment piece in the Guardian argued for societal change and the greater inclusion of autistics. She considered pre-natal testing for autism an act of eugenics.

Let’s get back to the science.

We don’t know what causes autism. A link between autism and testosterone is contentious, points out a story in Nature. The scientific community is not in agreement over testosterone’s role in autism. Ann Robinson, a British doctor, questions the safety and reliability of an autism test based on levels of fetal testosterone.

I wonder how this debate will unfold. Blogging about it has had the therapeutic effect of making my brain sleepy. I’d keep writing, but I’m quite tired and will probably start to repeat myself.

I think it’s time to flick the switch.

Then it happened again and it wasn’t exam season and I didn’t have a “reason” for my sleepless nights and it was not just a few lost nights. It was more like a lost week.

That’s when my education on the world of sleep remedies began. My mom suggested I take valerian, a herbal remedy made from the roots of the valerian plant. It was an ‘all natural’ approach, so how bad could it be? I couldn’t imagine how a pretty plant with lovely little white flowers could induce the painful and often embarrassing side-effects associated with certain lifestyle drugs.

No, said science nerd in me. I rationalised that I should be just as wary of herbal remedies as I was of over-the-counter drugs. My mom couldn’t understand. But after reading a story in last Thursday’s Globe and Mail, I sure hope she’s not taking valerian to lull her to sleep. In the story, Health Canada linked valerian to nightmares and hallucinations.

What could be worse, eh? You finally fall asleep, only to be sucked into a vortex of nightmares where you can’t tell what’s real from what’s not.

I imagined popping a pill of valerian and letting go, feeling the relief of a cloud of artificial sleep envelop me. A brutal awakening would follow. Startled and sweaty, I wouldn’t be able to tell if I really was a giant mouse, whose bloody encounter with the landlady, Mrs. Rahman, had turned me into a tail-less, vulnerable version of my former self.

I’ll have a glass of wine instead, please.

The majority of Quebeckers seem to agree with me. The journal Sleep, as reported in a Scientific American story, published a study that looked at what insomniacs in Quebec take or do to get a few hours shut-eye. At the top of the list was alcohol, followed by over-the-counter and prescription medication in second-place and insomnia health consultants in third-place.

Having one drink before bed can help you fall asleep, but as in my case, one drink led to two, which led to three and so on. Heavy drinking is part of college life, making the distinction between drinking for health and drinking for fun blurry at best.

So I paid a visit to an on-campus doctor, surely one who was well-acquainted with sleep-deprived students, and she gave me prescription sleeping pills that belong to the family of drugs called benzodiazepines. They come under the various names of Dalmane, Doral, Halicon, Prosom and Restoril.

And finally, sleep came. It was like bumping into that cheerful Australian you met backpacking in Laos two weeks after you’d had your tearful good-bye, not knowing when you’d see each other next. I’d found my best friend again.

After a few nights of deep sleep, I threw the pills in the trash. I was not about to become an addict.  Thankfully, my normal sleep pattern resumed, possibly kick-started by a few Restorils, and my insomnia worries faded.

The nightmare was over.