Deans' stroke musings: The Best Nap Time For Big Mental Health Boost

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Saturday, January 7, 2017

The Best Nap Time For Big Mental Health Boost

You already lost 5 years because of your stroke. How many decades before your doctor tells you about this cost-free way to regain some of that? I'm guessing never since I bet your doctor doesn't read research and has no staff person even summarizing research for the doctors and therapists.
http://www.spring.org.uk/2017/01/best-nap-time.php?omhide=true

The best nap time could keep your brain five years younger.

Taking a nap of around an hour after lunch is linked to the biggest long-term boost in mental health, new research suggests.
Almost 3,000 Chinese people over the age of 65 were included in the study of napping.
Around 60% reported taking a nap after lunch.
The researchers found that those taking an hour-long nap did the best on measures of memory and cognition.
The study’s authors explain their results:

“…a moderate-duration nap taken during the postlunch dip is associated with better overall cognition.
Older adults who did not nap or napped longer than 90 minutes (extended nappers) were significantly more likely than those who napped for 30 to 90 minutes after lunch (moderate nappers) to have lower overall cognition scores…”

In comparison, those who took shorter naps, longer naps or no naps were cognitively older.

It worked out that people who did not nap for around an hour were cognitively five years older:

“In the final analysis, no napping, short napping, and extended napping were associated with worse overall cognition than moderate napping.
The difference in overall cognition associated with these napping groups was similar to or greater than the decline in cognition associated with a 5-year increase in age.”

Best nap time

The study is one of the first to look at the benefits of longer afternoon naps.
The benefits of short naps are already well-known, the study’s authors write:

“…the short-term benefits of brief naps (e.g., 10 minutes) are well documented in previous studies and include greater alertness and accuracy and speed when performing a number of cognitive tasks, including psychomotor performance and short-term memory…”

The study was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (Li et al., 2016).