"Polysomnographic" and "sleep" patterns: synonims or two distinct terms - a reply.

We would like to thank dr. Begi for his comments and suggestions regarding our paper titled "Polysomnographic sleep patterns in depressive, schizophrenic and healthy subjects" published in Psychiatria Danubina (Ilankovi et al. 2014a). We agree with most of the comments, however, in dr. Begi ’ text we can see that various terms are being used in sleep research. The most common terms must not always be the best, and this is a problem in other areas of psychiatric research. Moreover, we can find the term “polysomnographic sleep patterns” in the current literature, too (Alfano et al. 2013) We respectfully disagree that “the terms polysomnographia and sleep are two linguistic variations of the same thing (tautology)” (Begi 2015). Polysomnographia is only one neurophysiological procedure for the electrophysiological measurement of one dimension of sleep. Sleep is a very complex, multidimensional psychobiological phenomenon (Ilankovi et al. 2014b). Other methods for the measurement of sleep and wakefulness are actigraphy and magnetoencephalography. Finally, we believe the explanations of the tables and figures are relative clear, but it is true they could be more informative. The results of our research study with all the details are presented in the first author’s PhD thesis (Ilankovi 2014c) Again, we thank dr. Begi for his positive and stimulating comments that “our research can facilitate diagnostic processes" (Begi 2015), particularly given the fact that it was the basic aim of our research.