It's only recently that attention has been given to sleep disorders that involve sexual behavior. With names like "sexsomnia" and "sleep sex," these conditions are often misunderstood, can have legal consequences, and can certainly cause stress in a person's relationships.
Some people can actually be asleep while having sex, and not remember any of it. Eleven different sex-related sleep disorders exist and pertain to behaviors such as the more common fondling, masturbation, sexual assault or rape of a partner, to persistent sexual arousal syndrome, ictal sexual hyperarousal and ictal orgasm - What? Apparently the physiological state of ictal mimics the symptoms of a seizure or stroke.
A recent University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) study shows that people with sleep apnea show tissue loss in brain regions that help store memory.
Why?
Apparently it has to do with the damage that impaired breathing can do in the part of the brain that lets us think and remember, according to principal investigator Ronald Harper, a professor of neurobiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The researchers are focusing on brain structures called mammillary bodies, located on the underside of the brain.
Of course, people with sleep apnea actually stop breathing during sleep, and can wake up repeatedly during the night. Research links sleep apnea to an increased risk of stroke, heart disease and diabetes and those who don't treat their sleep apnea can remain fatigued during the day and have problems concentrating and remembering things.
I'm reading one of my favorite magazines the other day, Spirituality & Health, and come across an article about a new Duke University study that surmises sleepless women actually suffer more than sleepless men.
The study finds that generally women are twice as likely as men to report sleep problems and that women are more like to associate poor sleep with "high levels of psychological distress and greater feelings of hostility, depression and anger," says lead study author Edward Suarez, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Duke.
This brings to mind concepts in the book, Why Gender Matters by Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D., my book club's most recent book selection. This volume speaks to what parents and teachers need to know about the "emerging science of sex differences." Understanding that there are indeed differences between the sexes can help in figuring out what's actually going on in children's lives.
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