Sleep and knee pain
26-09-2013
When we talk to customers about sleep and health we find that while many of them know about some of the more obvious connections many are unaware of quite how interconnected your health is to your sleep quality and quantity. Most of our customers know about how important sleep is you have been sick, they know that it is recuperative and can help you get better faster. They also know that depression, anxiety and sleep are all tied up, that lack of quality sleep can make depression and anxiety worse and that insomnia can even be one of the first symptoms of depression. However, while most of our customers know about these connections many do not realise quite how many areas of health are connected to sleep.
At Ergoflex we take our customers’ health seriously. We love helping people to find a bed that will make them happier and healthier, we love knowing that when we deliver another bed we are helping someone get a better night’s sleep, which in turn will improve their health. Over our many years we have come to understand the importance that sleep plays in a wide range of health areas, from depression to your back, from your weight to your knee... yes your knee. As amazing as it may seem, poor sleep can increase knee pain. That shows how interconnected your health and your sleep are.
A recent study by the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) found that quality of sleep has an impact on the knee pain of people suffering from Osteoarthritis. Megan Ruiter, Ph.D, one of the researchers, said that “It certainly makes sense that pain can interfere with a good night’s sleep, but there is growing evidence that poor sleep can itself lead to an increase in pain,” and that “Understanding this relationship could open up new avenues in pain management through the treatment of sleep disorders.”
The team at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have been studying the relationship between sleep and pain among patients who suffer from osteoarthritis of the knee. Most people with this disease experience fairly constant pain from this disease but so far the study has found that sufferers who have slept well will report less pain than normal and those that have slept poorly will report more pain than normal.
They believe that there are a number of factors at play here that could influence pain in these patients including biological factors, things like how sleep quality and quantity effect blood pressure or hormone levels, psychosocial factors, such as a person’s varying pain perception dependent on sleep, as well as genetic factors.
To us, this study represents something that we have known about for a long time, that the quality and quantity of your sleep make a huge difference to your health in almost every way, from your moods to the intensity of your pain, from the speed of your recovery after an illness to the longevity of your life.
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