ABC News recently ran a piece called: Sleep-Eating: 'Scarier Than I Thought'. I really liked this piece because it interviewed people who suffer from the condition. Usually, in this type of piece you maybe get a quote from someone with the condition - but this news piece gave detailed stories of different women who sleep-eat. It's a good read.

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Teens who sleep poorly have a 3.5 time greater chance of having high blood pressure than the good sleepers, according to new research. Bottom line, teens need 9 hours of sleep each night. With school starting so early, this is almost impossible.

What do you think? Any parents of teens have ideas about how to get their teens to sleep for 9 hours a night? Ban technology in the bedroom, enforces unreasonably early bedtimes? What to do? Please leave a response using the comments link below.

As if we don't get enough health scares watching the nightly news, now it seems that researchers have linked some types of cancer to the use of sleeping medications. What the researchers did was examine a database with information about people who took sleeping pills and compared them to non-takers.

The findings showed that 8 non-melanoma skin cancers and four unknown tumors appeared only in the sleeping pill taking group. Does this mean that sleeping pills cause cancer? No, there could be other reasons that people who tend to take sleeping pills have higher rates of cancer of these types. However, this study is backed up by studies in rats who also develop cancer after receiving high doses of sleeping medications.

But before you panic, these rate increases are very small and there are other, more immediate, health problems to not sleeping. The best approach I've heard is to use the sleeping pills temporarily while you focus a lot of effort on retraining your body to sleep well through good sleep hygiene (it doesn't work for everyone, but it's worth a try).

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We know that light levels impact your sleepiness. How this works is only crudely understood. We know that the hormone melatonin plays a role, but current understand is pretty crude.

Researchers found that in mice, a specific type of cell (called a retinal ganglion cells), when shut off, eliminate the impact of light levels on sleep. It may be possible to trigger the sleep response through stimulating these cells (causing the body to go into it's own sleep cycle rather than overpowering it with medications and supplements) .

Of course, they haven't even been able to use this pathway to make mice sleepy yet, but it does show some interesting new directions for sleep medications.

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