评论
打印
It's common for older people to say they have trouble sleeping.
老年人说自己睡眠不佳是很常见的事。
There seem to be two main difficulties: falling asleep at the start of the night and then waking up too early in the morning – yet finding it impossible to get back to sleep.
看起来问题主要有两方面：一是晚上入睡难，二是早晨醒的太早，而且无法重新入睡。
In some cases, the discomfort caused by a medical condition exacerbates sleep difficulties, but many find that even without the disturbance of physical symptoms, sleep still eludes them for at least part of the night.
在一些情况下，某些疾病加剧了他们的睡眠障碍，但是很多人在没有身体不适的情况下，晚上也无法得到充分睡眠。
In a new study from Russia, 130 people went to a laboratory one morning and then stayed there all day and overnight. Staff kept them awake for the entire time, regularly asking them to assess how sleepy they felt.
在俄罗斯开展的一项最新研究中，共有130人于早上前往实验室，在那里呆了整天整夜。研究人员让他们时刻保持清醒，并定时让他们评价自己的困倦程度。
These feelings of sleepiness vary throughout the day and night and in sleep deprivation experiments such as this, they are taken to reflect processes related to the body clock such as changes in body temperature at different times of day and the release of the hormone melatonin in the evening.
白天和晚上的睡意各不相同。在这样的睡眠剥夺实验中，被试者会反映出与生物钟相关的身体变化，比如白天不同的体温变化和晚上的褪黑激素的分泌情况。
Then all this data was analysed in relation to a sleep diary the people had kept for the previous week, in order to see how the pattern of sleepiness and slow brainwaves varied according to propensity to be morning or evening types.
然后，研究人员分析了所有这些数据，并与过去一周他们的睡眠日记对照，根据早起倾向者或晚睡倾向者的不同特点，分析睡意和较慢的脑电波的分布情况。
The slow-wave activity in the volunteers' brains was also measured several times during the day and night. They found that, once again, the older people felt sleepy at different times from the younger people and had different timings of slow-wave activity in the brain.
研究人员还在白天和夜晚测量了志愿者较慢的脑电波。他们再次发现，老年人的睡意分布时间与年轻人不同，他们较慢的脑电波的出现时间也与年轻人不一样。
The study's author, Arcady Putilov, suggests that two mechanisms might be responsible for the decrease in sleep time. He believes that in middle age the processes underlying the oscillations of slow-wave sleep weaken, making it harder to stay asleep, and on top of that, in older age the stronger circadian rhythms weaken because changes in body temperature and the release of the hormone melatonin weaken.
该研究的作者阿卡狄·普提洛夫认为，有两套机制导致睡眠时间减少。人到中年，潜在的慢波睡眠减弱，让人很难保持睡着状态。而到老年，由于体温的变化和褪黑激素的减少，较强的生物钟节奏也会减弱。
