User talk:Aadieu

Bugger, accidentally put my user page here. Moved to its relevant position. Aadieu (talk) 12:56, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Me too

I have N24 since my first year in university, in the early 1980s. I would flip over once every three weeks, so I estimate my body clock at close to 25 hours. I discovered the melatonin PRC two years ago and I've been fairly successful at controlling my condition since. The essential success factor is to determine your internal baseline. In my case, I've learned to notice a body temperature drop before my natural hit-the-hay time. I can fall asleep several hours before this, but it doesn't aid my therapy. Thirty minutes to an hour of deep yet semi-lucid dream sleep before waking firmly establishes my reference point at time of waking. I might experience this as rarely as once a week, but it's a golden data point when it occurs.

In my first year I followed the protocol of 3mg of melatonin precisely 8 hours after my natural wake time, as best established by the dream sleep event. An hour and a half after taking the melatonin, I would begin to yawn heavily, and for the rest of the day I would have trouble taking initiative of any kind, but I often managed to productively continue something I was already doing. This was immediately effective in controlling my sleep phase, until I became too strict in maintaining conformance and neglected to listen to my body at which point I would have to flip over and start again. I resented losing 1/3 of my day to yawning and listlessness, but I was so ecstatic about gaining control I hardly complained for the first year.

More recently I discovered that a lower dose taken a little later works just as well. I started taking 1mg 9.5 hours after my natural wake time. This greatly reduces the negative effects on my powers of concentration and gives me back the last third of my day. When I made this protocol change two months ago, I began to keep a rigorous sleep diary again. I soon discovered that I was losing about 10m a day. Over the course of a month, my rise time drifted from early morning to early afternoon. I was not pleased about this and I had no mechanism to combat this. Taking more melatonin does not increase the effect.

At this point I decided to add blue light into the protocol. I use a 2.5W cyan-blue LED lamp, pointed directly into my face at a distance of 500 to 1000mm for half an hour, immediately upon opening my eyes. After three weeks of this, I've managed to claw my natural rise time back to mid morning.

I'm in a pretty good situation if this holds up. Lower doses of the melatonin alone nearly control my condition, and I can make a corrective advance by supplementing with blue light therapy. It was a terrible thing in my first year that every missed dose caused my sleep phase to delay almost a full hour and I had very little power to claw it back again.

Once I claw back to an 08:00 rise time, I'm going to experiment with a further reduction to 0.5mg taken 10 to 10.5 hours after waking. Better for compliance if I'm taking it *after* the end of my work day, since many of the doses I missed resulted from my watch going off in heavy meetings. I would be so involved in the argument, I would completely tune out my watch, and shut off the alarm on auto-pilot.

Feel free to contact me through my user page, or if you wish to take this discussion off-line, send me an email through my wikipedia account. MaxEnt (talk) 21:16, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Non-24

SO... any successes in treating it?

As someone with a 28-hour sleep-wake cycle, I'm beyond curious. And it isn't like there's a lot of information available... Aadieu (talk) 18:39, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

True, and it isn't even easy to look it up as it has so many names. It's easier to look up DSPS and see if N24 is mentioned. Or search for 'blind' and 'circadian'. Researchers will have to admit soon, I think, that there are more sighted cases than they have been claiming/admitting.

I've heard of a couple of sighted young people who are successfully managed by the treatments for DSPS, both being treated by experts. A keyword may be young. One of them uses Rozerem as needed now; he likes it better than melatonin.

Among the blind, it seems that those whose natural circadian period is very near to 24 hours are the easiest to treat - with small doses of melatonin. I've not been in contact with any of them. Just read about them, for example in A. Lewy's research.

The sighted I know about, aside from those two young ones, haven't achieved anything near a cure, sorry to say. It's possible, I suppose, that some manage it very well and just don't feel a need to tell the world about it....

Good luck! - Hordaland (talk) 05:54, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Replied on my Talk page. - Hordaland (talk) 01:31, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

P.S. Perhaps this blog entry, which I've just discovered, is the answer to your question: http://non24.blogspot.com/ - Hordaland (talk) 02:30, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Cat

Interesting content, but could you please add the source from which you got this information? Tim Vickers (talk) 16:46, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Which part? Declawed cats = defenseless and unable to hunt? Cats aren't dogs, they use their claws for everything, and their jaws only for the final kill of a trapped prey or enemy. That's not exactly controversial information. It would be like adding a source to "cats are predatory mammals" - certainly by the book, but rather superfluous and just adding clutter. If you absolutely need a source, there are any number of them, such as this, http://www.homevet.com/petcare/declaw.html Aadieu (talk) 18:23, 16 March 2010 (UTC)