BACKGROUND The long term adverse effects of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), a viral disease, are poorly understood. METHODS Sleep physiology, somatic and mood symptoms of 22 Toronto subjects, 21 of whom were healthcare workers, (19 females, 3 males, mean age 46.29 yrs.+/- 11.02) who remained unable to return to their former occupation (mean 19.8 months, range: 13 to 36 months follow...

BACKGROUND We previously published the performance evaluation of an automated electroencephalography (EEG)-based single-channel sleep-wake detection algorithm called Z-ALG used by the Zmachine(®) sleep monitoring system. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the performance of a new algorithm called Z-PLUS, which further differentiates sleep as detected by Z-ALG into Light Sleep, Deep Slee...

OBJECTIVES To show that EEG markers formed using the variable percent recurrence reliably quantified two related aspects of sleep quality, sleep depth and sleep fragmentation. As hypotheses, the depth marker would increase and the fragmentation marker decrease in patients where improved sleep quality occurred when assessed by polysomnography. METHODS The patients (N=20) had been diagnosed wit...

BACKGROUND Chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) behavioural symptoms and medically unexplainable somatic symptoms are reported to occur following the stressful experience of military combatants in war zones. AIMS To determine the contribution of disordered EEG sleep physiology in those military combatants who have unexplainable physical symptoms and PTSD behavioural difficulties foll...

The most reliable technique for the diagnosis of nocturnal frontal lobe epilepsy (NFLE) is nocturnal video-polysomnography, which is an expensive procedure and unavailable in many Departments of Neurology and Epileptology around the world. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the role of routine video-EEG and video-EEG after sleep deprivation, during the daytime, in the diagnosis of NFL...

We have examined the effect of injection of 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) into the ventral tegmental area (VTA) on the changes in arterial blood pressure (AP) and heart rate (HR) during the transition from non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep to REM sleep. The 6-OHDA-treated rats showed suppression of the increase of AP and HR during REM sleep and of theta frequency in the cortical electroencephalo...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to find the best set of characteristics of polysomnographic signals for the automatic classification of sleep stages. METHODS A selection was made from 74 measures, including linear spectral measures, interdependency measures, and nonlinear measures of complexity that were computed for the all-night polysomnographic recordings of 20 healthy subjects. T...

The sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) is highly heritable in humans and yet little is known about the genetic basis of inter-individual differences in sleep architecture. The aim of this study was to identify associations between candidate circadian gene variants and the polysomnogram, recorded under highly controlled laboratory conditions during a baseline, overnight, 8 h sleep opportunity. A c...

High density EEG (hdEEG) during sleep combines the superior temporal resolution of EEG recordings with high spatial resolution. Thus, this method allows a topographical analysis of sleep EEG activity and thereby fosters the shift from a global view of sleep to a local one. HdEEG allowed to investigate sleep rhythms in terms of their characteristic behavior (e.g., the traveling of slow waves) an...

Methods for rapid and objective quantification of interictal spikes in raw, unprocessed electroencephalogram (EEG) samples are scarce. We evaluated the accuracy of a tailored automated spike quantification algorithm. The automated quantification was compared with the quantification by two board-certified clinical neurophysiologists (gold-standard) in five steps: 1) accuracy in a single EEG chan...