BACKGROUND Patients with winter depression, (seasonal affective disorder, SAD) frequently complain of difficulty awakening in the morning. Dawn simulation has been found effective in treating SAD, but its effect on difficulty awakening has not been assessed. METHODS Fifty medication-free patients with SAD associated with hypersomnia were randomized to receive either 1 week of dawn simulation ...

High dream recallers (HR) show a larger brain reactivity to auditory stimuli during wakefulness and sleep as compared to low dream recallers (LR) and also more intra-sleep wakefulness (ISW), but no other modification of the sleep macrostructure. To further understand the possible causal link between brain responses, ISW and dream recall, we investigated the sleep microstructure of HR and LR, an...

Cortisol concentration in both serum and saliva sharply increases and reaches a peak within the first hour after waking in the morning. This phenomenon is known as the cortisol awakening response (CAR) and is used as an index of hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis function. We examined whether ovarian steroid concentrations increased after awakening as with the CAR in the HPA axis. To do ...

PURPOSE Our main aim was to determine the time interval between the seizure onsets and arousal-awakening related to these seizures in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and to discuss the role of lateralization on arousal-awakening mechanisms. METHODS Thirty-three TLE patients who underwent video-EEG monitoring with simultaneous polysomnography (PSG) and had recorded nocturnal seizure...