The oral and nasal contributions to inhaled ventilation were simultaneously quantified during sleep in 10 healthy subjects (5 men, 5 women) aged 43 +/- 5 yr, with normal nasal resistance (mean 2.0 +/- 0.3 cmH(2)O. l(-1). s(-1)) by use of a divided oral and nasal mask. Minute ventilation awake (5.9 +/- 0.3 l/min) was higher than that during sleep (5.2 +/- 0.3 l/min; P < 0.0001), but there was no...

UNLABELLED Factors modifying the effect of environmental noise on sleep include sex, age, susceptibility, personality and the health status, including past and present history of disease. OBJECTIVE The effects of noise on sleep and habituation of sleep to noise were summarized. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS 1) The effect of noise on sleep is associated with physical changes, such as changes in he...

STUDY OBJECTIVES Brief arousals have been systematically scored during sleep for more than 20 years. Despite significant knowledge concerning the importance of arousals for the sleep process in normal subjects and patients, comprehensive age norms have not been published. METHODS Seventy-six normal subjects (40 men) without sleep apnea or periodic limb movements of sleep, aged 18 to 70 years,...

The effects of L-tryptophan (4 g) on the waking EEG and daytime sleep were studied in a group of 20 normal adults. Subjects were assigned to a morning or afternoon group, and data were collected on two occasions, after L-tryptophan and after placebo, assigned in a counterbalanced order. L-Tryptophan significantly reduced sleep latency without altering nap sleep stages and elevated plasma total ...

Since its discovery by Hans Berger in 1929, the electroencephalogram (EEG) has been the most utilized signal to clinically assess brain function. The enormous complexity of the EEG signal, both in time and space, should not surprise us since the EEG is a direct correlate of brain function. If the system to be probed is complex and our signal is a reliable descriptor of its function, then we can...

OBJECTIVES Soft-computing techniques are commonly used to detect medical phenomena and to help with clinical diagnoses and treatment. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the single electroencephalography (EEG) signal with the chaotic methods in order to identify the sleep stages. METHODS Data acquisition (polysomnography) was performed on four healthy young adults (all males with a mean a...

Pharmaco-sleep studies in humans aim at the description of the effects of drugs, most frequently substances that act on the central nervous system, by means of quantitative analysis of biosignals recorded in subjects during sleep. Up to 2007, the only standard for the classification of sleep macrostructure that found worldwide acceptance were the rules published in 1968 by Rechtschaffen and Kal...

Narcolepsy with hypocretin deficiency is known to alter cardiovascular control during sleep, but its aetiology is disputed. As cardiovascular control differs between sleep states, and narcolepsy affects sleep architecture, controlling for both duration and transitions of sleep states is necessary. This study therefore aimed to assess heart rate and its variability in narcolepsy during sleep tak...

Identifying the stages of sleep, or sleep staging, is an unavoidable step in sleep research and typically requires visual inspection of electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG) data. Currently, scoring is slow, biased and prone to error by humans and thus is the most important bottleneck for large-scale sleep research in animals. We have developed an unsupervised, fully automated...

Low motor activity levels and prolonged episodes of uninterrupted immobility are characteristics of sleep. In clinical practice, the use of polysomnographic (PSG) recording is a standard procedure to assess sleep. However, PSG is not suitable for long-term monitoring in the home environment. This paper describes the development of a portable telemonitoring device that detects movements of a sub...