What we know

  • Sleep quality

  • Stages of sleep

  • Consumption & application

  • Clinical study

Sleep quality

Sleep quality is the satisfaction we get from our sleep experience.

This includes sleep efficiency, sleep latency, sleep duration, and wakefulness after sleep onset [2].

Essentially, this means how long we sleep and how restful the sleep is. But, sleeping more hours does not mean you're getting restful sleep.

In fact, when your body doesn't get quality sleep, there areconsequences on our brain and physical health in the long term.

Stages of sleep

Every night, you actually take a rollercoaster ride through the different sleep phases.

Each phase plays a different role in how you feel the next waking day. Learn how each stage helps prepare and restore your brain and body to strike a good balance.

Consumption & application

How are Sleep Patches different from Sleep Supplements?

Melatonin has a short half-life and takes 40 to 60 minutes for half of it to be absorbed by your body [3].

As a result, when you ingest melatonin orally, it loses its effect after a while and sometimes right before you can fall asleep.

Sleep patches, however, infuse melatonin at a sustained rate. When melatonin is introduced to your body slowly, it helps you maintain your sleep quality for as long as it's applied.

Clinical Study

Study design

A joint study done by the Harvard Medical School, Surrey Sleep Research Centre and Brigham and Women’s Hospital was conducted to demonstrate the effects of melatonin patches used on humans. It aims to demonstrate how melatonin when applied as a patch, helps with better sleep quality.

Study result [1]

Healthy subjects were recruited and received a sleep patch in a randomised, double-blind, crossover manner with placebo in place. They were tasked to apply the sleep patch 1h before an 8-hour sleeping opportunity. It is found that transdermal melatonin patches increased the duration of rapid-eye-movement sleep by 20.7 min, and decreased wakefulness after sleep onset by 55.6 min.

References

[1] Aeschbach D, Lockyer BJ, Dijk DJ, Lockley SW, Nuwayser ES, Nichols LD, Czeisler CA. “Use of transdermal melatonin delivery to improve sleep maintenance during daytime.” Clin Pharmacol Ther. 2009 Oct;86(4):378-82. doi: 10.1038/clpt.2009.109. Epub 2009 Jul 15. PMID: 19606092; PMCID: PMC2909186.

[2] Lee, Beom-Jin & Parrott, K & Ayres, J & Sack, R. “Preliminary evaluation of transdermal delivery of melatonin in human subjects.” Research communications in molecular pathology and pharmacology. 85. 337-46, 1994  

[3] V. Dubey, D. Mishra, A. Asthana, and N. K. Jain, “Transdermal delivery of a pineal hormone: Melatonin via elastic liposomes,” Biomaterials, vol. 27, no. 18, pp. 3491–3496, 2006.