The October issue of Community Health features an article about how sleep changes with age, sleep problems affecting seniors, and how these problems can be alleviated or treated. Insomnia, the most common sleep ailment, may worsen with age. Although it’s not always easy to treat, insomnia can be minimized by practicing good sleep hygiene.
“Sleep is really important,” says Dr. Stephen Akers, a sleep medicine specialist at Cooper University Hospital in New Jersey. “We spend one-third of our life asleep, and it has a big impact on how we feel during the daytime.”
Unfortunately for seniors, a number of issues—such as pain, incontinence and just plain getting older—make it tougher to get a restful night’s sleep.
“As we age, dreaming sleep is pretty well preserved, but we lose more and more of this deep, slow-wave sleep,” Akers says. “It’s probably slow-wave sleep that makes us feel refreshed and alert, at least in men.”
“Health care practitioners sometimes ignore insomnia because they’re not trained to deal with it, so it’s important to see a sleep specialist,” says Stephen M. Akers, MD, Sleep Specialist at Cooper. “You don’t want to spend a lot of time in bed awake because the bed becomes associated more with being awake than asleep.”