Sleep Disorders
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Insomnia
have trouble getting to sllep and staying alseep? You could be suffering from Insomnia! Read all about it here.
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Relaxation and Sleep Disorders
It is hard enough to get quality sleep when you do not have to cope with any sleep disorders, it is even hard when you suffer from Sleep Apnea, insomnia or any of a host of other debilitating sleep disorders. Relaxation is one such technique that can help you get a good night’s sleep.
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Your Sleep Bank Acount
You may be overdrawn at the Bank – the Sleep Bank, that is. And I bet you did not even know you were. Read this article to find out all about your Sleep BanK account.
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Getting a Good Night’s Sleep - Right!
How do we get a good night's sleep. Is it possible. This article takes a look at some suggestions and their practicality
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Your Very Own Sleep Diary
Are you getting your forty winks? Are you waking up refreshed in the morning? Or is your sleep pattern shot all to pieces? There is one way you can find out. You can start your very own sleep diary.
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Shift Work Sleep Disorder (SWSD)
In the United States it is estimated that of the nearly twenty million people who work some form of shift work, 25 percent suffer from Shift Work Sleep Disorder (SWSD). It is even worse for those who rotate through various shifts. Read about SWSD here.
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When Sleep Is Unwelcome
Australian researchers have recently unraveled a significant part of the narcolepsy puzzle.
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The Dangers of Sleep Apnea
The sudden death recently of football great Reggie White from complications due to Sleep Apnea combined with an inflammatory condition shocked the sports world. It also points out the dangers of undiagnosed sleep disorders such as Sleep Apnea.
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Sleep Disorders and the Holidays
The Holiday season is upon us and everyone is gearing up for the fun - and ths stress.
Holiday stress can mean less sleep. And it is hard enough for sleep-disorder sufferers to get enough quality sleep without the added holiday stress. Read about some
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Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS) Part Two
In Part Two of Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS) we look at what treatments are available for RLS, what to avoid if you have RLS and some tips on how to live with Restless Legs Syndrome.
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Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS) Part One
Restless Legs Syndrome RLS is a neurological disorder that close to fifteen percent of the people living in the United States suffer from. If you experience weird sensations in your legs then you may have RLS.
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Periodic Limb Movement Disorder
Periodic Limb Movement Disorder can adversely effect your marriage or relationship. This article looks at what the disorder is, how it is diagnosed and treated.
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A Night in a Sleep Lab Part Two
In Part Two, we will see what usually happens in a typical Sleep Lab. Are you ready for an adventure?
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A Night in a Sleep Lab Part One
Your doctor has decided to refer you to a sleep lab for testing. What is a sleep lab like? What happens there? What do you have to do to get ready for it?
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Diagnosing Sleep Apnea
Your spouse and family have told you that you snore and snort (that is stop breathing) during sleep. You are tired all day even though you seemed to have sleep all night. You have researched Sleep Apnea and checked the various symptom checklists. And yes, it seems that you just might be suffering from sleep apnea. What do you do next?
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Sleep Apnea - An Overview
Sleep Apnea is much more common then you think. You could be suffering from it. This article presents an overview of Sleep Apnea including a quizz of possible symptoms.
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Treatment of Snoring
If one and all have diagnosed you as a “snorer”, then you probably have been told how to cure it. There are probably as many cures for snoring as there are people complaining about your snoring. This article take a look at some of the options.
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Snoring
Snoring is a major cause of marriage breakdown and the source of endless jokes. But what is Soring and what causes it? Can it be cured? Read all about it here.
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What Are Sleep Disorders?
What are sleep disorders and what are their signs and symptoms? Read about them here.
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Sleeping Dancing with Death
Every night I would sleep dance with death until I was diagnosed with a sleep disorder and proscribed treatment. Now I dance with a different partner - a CPAP machine and it saves my life every time I sleep!
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An Apneic Abroad
The author recounts his misadventures trying to use his CPAP machine during foreign travels--as a warning to others. He also describes a plan to carry spares of every CPAP part when traveling abroad.
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Damaged Brains?
Research findings showing neuropsychological impairment of the type commonly associated with brain disease in patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea, even under treatment with Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, raise fears of irreversible "brain damage" as a consequence of OSA. However, research has yet to separate continuous impairment from state-dependent impairment related to varying levels of Excessive Daytime Sleepiness. Until such studies show otherwise, patients should maintain an attitude of concern enough to keep track of new findings, but resist counterproductive worry and anxiety over the issue.
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Dreams, Prophecy, and Prescience
The author questions the long-held assumption that dreams foretell the future, and offers the alternative theory that dreams start from recent experience and develop dream plots along lines that reflect intuitive, unconscious premonitions based not on the supernatural but on the perceptions of the right brain, not amenable to logical discussion.
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SDB & PLMS: What Does It Mean?
SDB and PLMS, two different causes of sleep disruption, appear to be associated in individuals, and in time. This shows one example of the multifactorial nature of sleep problems.
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How to Live with Hypersomnia and Excessive Daytime Sleepiness
The author, a physician afflicted with obstructive sleep apnea and chronic hypersomnia (excessive daytime sleepiness), recounts his own strategies and those of others for dealing with such a disabling symptom.
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Houses?
The many different uses of the word "house" includes one identifying a hospital. The meaning of this metaphor makes an interesting subject for idle contemplation.
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Understanding Your Sleep Study Results: RDI, Desaturation, and Sleep Architecture
The report of sleep polysomnography (also known as the overnight laboratory sleep study) plays such an important role in the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders--especially sleep apnea--that every patient who undergoes one should request a copy. It will prove much more interesting and useful if the patient can read the report with some understanding; it should not be that difficult to learn what to make of it, at least in part. Moreover, it can help a lot in relaying information to other doctors who need to know more than just a diagnostic impression given to a patient in a brief discussion with a sleep specialist.
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dreamdeath
Can you die in your sleep from apnea? If so, would that most likely happen in the midst of a dream--or a nightmare? Thinking about this casts a shadow on the common conception of "dying in one's sleep."
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A Minor Matter of Delay . . .
A recently published research abstract showing the high frequency of accidents and other untoward events during the few weeks' delay between first clinical diagnosis of OSA and first sleep study fails to consider the greater implications of other, longer delays in getting OSA diagnosed and treated.
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HoseHeads, Unite!
Sleep activism has gained strength from the discovery of sleep apnea as a relatively common illness present among all classes and types of people. Many of those diagnosed and treated for this disease look back over their past medical history and see frequent instances of misdiagnosis and mistreatment by doctors ignorant of developments in the field of sleep medicine over the past 30 years. Also, we have become aware that the great majority of those afflicted with sleep apnea remain undiagnosed and untreated. The cause involves education of both physicians and the general public on sleep disorders.
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How to Manage Your Doctor
Doctors can be viewed as employees of their patients, who decide to take them on, pay them, and may choose to fire them if they prove unsatisfactory. However, like any good employer, the patient should make efforts to manage a difficult doctor so as to avoid the troublesome interruption of services often resulting from a de facto though unspoken termination.
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Pictures of Sleep
Drawn from the wealth of visual material available on the Internet are a select group of photos, drawings, and graphs that reveal important aspects of sleep and its disorders more readily than words could describe.
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Only the Internet . . .
Only the Internet offers patients with a wide range of diseases, such as obstructive sleep apnea, the opportunity to interact with a large number of similarly afflicted people around the country and the world. Often, the Internet also offers disease-specific informational web sites that allow patients access to the latest developments in research on their illnesses. Some of these permit free, informal "consultations" with experts in the field. Bulletin boards give people the opportunity to post specific problems and get suggestions from others, including not only fellow patients but professionals as well. Finally, some medical journals, prohibitively expensive for most people to buy subscriptions, permit free access to their contents on-line for doctors and patients alike.
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An Operation Obsession
A large body of research exists to raise questions about the use of most currently available operations for obstructive sleep apnea. Nevertheless, these continue in widespread use, often persistently sought by patients despite evidence against their effectiveness, at least in contrast to that of CPAP. This article considers some explanations for this "operation obsession."
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Exercise & Apnea: Blessing or Curse?
A recent study has shown that a modest exercise program improves symptoms of sleep apnea. Aside from the good news that a little increase of activity can help, there is the danger that such findings will encourage doctors to perpetuate the already too prevalent practice of "blaming the victim" of apnea for being overweight and out of shape, which are consequences of as much as contributors to the disease. A solution to these problems may lie out of reach of many symptomatic apnea patients.
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WHY SLEEP?
A newly published scientific review article in the journal Sleep discusses current theories on the function of sleep; the article published here attempts to translate this discussion for easier access by the interested lay reader, with special reference to the need for sleep.
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How to Find Diagnosis and Treatment for Apnea?
This article helps guide the person suspected of or newly diagnosed with sleep apnea to locate nearby resources for evaluation and treatment. It also touches on how to approach and deal with your sleep specialist.
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How to Educate Yourself on ApneaApnea Self-Education
This is guide to learning more about Sleep Apnea, for people newly diagnosed with that diseased, or even just suspected, by themselves or others, to have it. It should also serve to guide those who care about the afflicted--family and close friends who want to help.
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"SLEEPINESS": What Does It Mean?
Sleepiness, as a word, has a common meaning that falls short of the precision required for its use in describing a medical symptom which everyone can agree on. This is becoming apparent from some recently published research. How we should define sleepiness in an objective and precise way represents a complex issue.
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License to Kill
Everyone should remain aware that undergoing medical treatment involves real and extreme risks to the patient which are not shared to any significant degree by those doctors and other medical personnel to whom one entrusts one's life. Through negligence, oversight, or unavailable human error, medical mistreatment can kill with relative impunity. Therefore, it behooves the consumer of medical care to retain responsibility and control. In particular, people with sleep apnea live at risk of lethal interactions with the medical system, of which they should remain always aware.
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To Nap or Not to Nap: Is That the Question?
Discussion of the different roles of different types of napping in normal people, those sleep deprived by habit or choice, and those who suffer excessive daytime sleepiness and nap as a result of common sleep disorders.
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Postoperative Catastrophes with OSA Patients: Two Sad Accounts
Obstructive Sleep Apnea presents special hazards after surgery, requiring adjustment of postoperative care, which often fails to take place. Two cases of mortality illustrate this point.
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Drowsy Drivers Beware!
Describes a scenario that might happen in the very near future: a law against drowsy driving, which has proven to be as major a factor in accidents as alcohol. Moreover, there is ample evidence that sleep deprivation and resultant sleepiness impair concentration and memory, slow reflexes, and even cause poor coordination. Already doctors aware of patients with illnesses like sleep apnea causing excessive daytime sleepiness sufficient to affect their driving, have begun to contact the Department of Motor Vehicles to have that patient's license suspended or revoked.
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Can Your Bed Partner's Snoring Make You Sick?
A new study claims to be the first to show that wives of snorers suffer symptoms of sleep disturbance and the consequences of sleep deprivation, two to three times as often as women with husbands who do not snore. The same finding should prove to apply to men living with women who snore. While snoring is more frequent in men than women (41% vs. 28%), together male and female snorers make up one-third of the population--an extremely common problem!
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PHANTOM DEATH
Many who already know that they have obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) are well aware of the potentially fatal consequences of this disease. But many, many more have the disease without knowing it. This article attempts to use the shock value of a possible case of death in sleep due directly to apnea, in order to gain the attention of the general public, who need to know much more about OSA.
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Dickens' "Fat Boy:" A Classic Case of What?
The "Pickwick Syndrome," named after a character named Joe in The Pickwick Papers purports to describe a prototypical case of sleep apnea, but in reality represents nothing of the sort. The fat boy who falls asleep constantly and immediately in the midst of any kind of vigorous activity resembles, if anything, a case of narcolepsy. However, Dickens did not attempt to portray a real-life clinical syndrome; like most fictional characters, that of Joe need only convince the reader to suspend disbelief, not to reflect some authentic illness. The use of stereotypical "classical cases" in medicine militates against identification of the many people with the disease who do not fit the stereotype.
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Did Sleep Apnea Afflict Johannes Brahms?
Johannes Brahms had many signs and symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea--frequent napping under inappropriate circumstances, falling asleep with extraordinary rapidity, heroic snoring. His success despite this deserves our admiration and emulation in the face of other disabling diseases. Moreover, current epidemiologic data suggests that OSA must affected many others, in times when it could not be diagnosed or treatment, but might have drawn ridicule or even accusations of character defects, like "laziness."
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Ignoring Snoring: A Dangerous Truce
This article is geared to alerting people who sleep with annoying snorers as to the danger of trying to "live with" the problem, and the importance of pursuing the possibility of diagnosable, dangerous, yet treatable Sleep Apnea.
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