All new mothers are somewhat anxious. Being a mother is a new role, a new job, with a new person in your life and new responsibilities. Anxiety in response to this situation is very common and somewhat adaptive. However, for several reasons, some mothers have excessive worries and experience a severe (and invalidating) level of anxiety in perinatal period. Important gonadal steroid levels modif...

Studies have shown that drowsiness and hypovigilance frequently occur during highway driving and that they may have serious implications in terms of accident causation. This paper focuses on the task induced factors that are involved in the development of these phenomena. A driving simulator study was conducted in order to evaluate the impact of the monotony of roadside visual stimulation using...

Sleep complaints were obtained from 22 hospitalised patients with traumatic brain injury of recent onset (median 3.5 months after injury) and were compared with those of 77 discharged patients who had sustained brain injury about two to three years (median 29.5 months) previously. A high incidence of sleep complaints was noted in both groups (72.7% and 51.9% respectively). Disorders in initiati...

The multiple sleep latency test and the maintenance of wakefulness test were administered on the same day to 258 consecutive patients whose clinical presentation required evaluation for excessive sleepiness. While the MSLT is the standard test for assessing excessive daytime sleepiness, the MWT may have some clinical advantage over the MSLT when the assessment of daytime alertness is the primar...

Recently, the European Respiratory Journal published a study by MEDIANO et al. [1] on the determinants of excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) in obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) patients. The study did not find differences in body mass index (BMI), age or apnoea/hypopnoea index (AHI) between OSA patients with and without EDS, but found significantly more pronounced nocturnal hypoxaemia in patients...

OBJECTIVE To assess duration of excessive crying and its relation to sleep and eating disturbances in a population sample of infants. DESIGN Cross-sectional study. SETTING Random digit-dialing survey, enrolling birth cohorts between 1999 and 2003, in Germany. PARTICIPANTS Children aged 4 years and younger. MAIN EXPOSURES Excessive crying, retrospectively ascertained according to modifie...

STUDY OBJECTIVES Only a few studies have examined the possible association between excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) and risk of occupational injuries, and most of them were based on self-reports. This study tested this association in daytime workers using injury data taken from organizational archives. DESIGN A retrospective and prospective study. It covered injury occurrence during two yea...

OBJECTIVE Epidemiologic studies consistently link caffeine, a nonselective adenosine antagonist, to lower risk of Parkinson disease (PD). However, the symptomatic effects of caffeine in PD have not been adequately evaluated. METHODS We conducted a 6-week randomized controlled trial of caffeine in PD to assess effects upon daytime somnolence, motor severity, and other nonmotor features. Patien...

No data are available in the literature assessing the potential use of waking electroencephalographic (EEG) activity in the detection of excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) in patients with sleep-related breathing disorders (SRBD). The aim of this study was to evaluate whether waking EEG spectral power reflects the level of EDS in SRBD patients. The study was performed in 48 patients in whom qua...