CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVE Information on the correlation of normative reproductive hormone levels with physical development (Tanner stages) during puberty and on the influences of genes and environment on variation in these hormones and Tanner stages is limited. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS One hundred twelve healthy 9-year-old twin pairs (n = 224) took part in a longitudinal study, of which...

Plasma thyrotropin (TSH) levels have been previously shown to be associated with the internal sleep structure determined by conventional scoring of sleep stages. This temporal relationship was re-evaluated using spectral analysis of the sleep electroencephalogram (EEG). Eight healthy male subjects underwent two randomized night studies after having received either placebo or 5 mg ritanserin, a ...

In this study cyclic changes of human sleep structure were examined. For whole-night polysomnograms of 35 healthy volunteers of both sexes, manual hypnograms were created and divided into NREM-REM cycles. EEG signals from C3-A2 derivation were analysed by computer using a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). For consecutive NREM-REM cycles of individual sleep stages, EEG power density contents for del...

Automated detection of waveforms such as delta and K-complex in the EEG is an important component of sleep stage monitoring. The K-complex is a key feature that contributes to sleep stages assessment. However, its automated detection is still difficult due to the stochastic nature of the EEG. In this paper, we propose a detection structure which can be interpreted as joint linear filtering oper...

To study the effects of neuroleptic therapy on sleep EEG variables in schizophrenia, as well as the clinical correlates of these variables, we performed polysomnographic (PSG) studies on 14 schizophrenic inpatients before and during neuroleptic therapy. Sleep continuity measures improved after 3 weeks of neuroleptic therapy, showing decreased sleep latency and improved sleep efficiency. REM lat...

The influence of afferent impulses of intestinal origin on the sleep stages was studied in fed and starved cats. Low-frequency electrical stimulation of the mucosal surface in a small intestinal fistula reduced the latency of sleep onset. The number of slow wave sleep episodes decreased, but their mean duration increased during stimulation. Conversely, the number of paradoxical sleep episodes i...

OBJECTIVES Sleep is essential for recovery and performance in elite athletes. While it is generally assumed that exercise benefits sleep, high training load may jeopardize sleep and hence limit adequate recovery. To examine this, the current study assessed objective sleep quantity and sleep stage distributions in elite athletes and calculated their association with perceived training load. DE...

We seek general principles of the structure of the cellular collective activity associated with conscious awareness. Can we obtain evidence for features of the optimal brain organization that allows for adequate processing of stimuli and that may guide the emergence of cognition and consciousness? Analyzing brain recordings in conscious and unconscious states, we followed initially the classic ...

The sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) is characterized by typical oscillatory patterns such as sleep spindles and slow waves. Recently, we proposed a method to detect and analyze these patterns using linear autoregressive models for short (approximately 1 s) data segments. We analyzed the temporal organization of sleep spindles and discuss to what extent the observed interevent intervals corresp...

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of the energy cost of swimming, body composition, and technical parameters on swimming performance in young swimmers. Twenty-nine swimmers, 15 prepubertal (11.9 +/- 0.3 years; Tanner Stages 1-2) and 14 pubertal (14.3 +/- 1.4 years; Tanner Stages 3-4) boys participated in the study. The energy cost of swimming (Cs) and stroking parameters we...