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A sleeping timebomb - zonk - 08-26-2012
SMH August 23, 2012
http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/a-sleeping-timebomb-20120822-24mwd.html
It can ruin your health and your wellbeing. And thanks to rising obesity, sleep apnoea is about to become a global problem, writes David Randall.
This is the tale of how an Australian man with a vacuum cleaner fixed a mistake in evolution
http://images.smh.com.au/2012/08/22/3575552/art-353-colin-20sullivan-300x0.jpg
It begins in the late 1970s. Colin Sullivan is a physician in the respiratory unit at Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. There, he treats patients who have problems breathing. The most common complaint, by far, is snoring.
Sullivan knows better than most doctors in his field that snoring is often a sign of a serious disorder known as sleep apnoea. It had been identified only about a decade earlier.
Patients with sleep apnoea experience a strange nightly sensation that brings the body disturbingly close to death. First, the throat closes randomly throughout the night, choking off the body's air supply. This puts in motion a cascade of increasingly bad side effects.
As if on a seesaw, the lack of air causes the oxygen levels in the blood to plummet and blood pressure to jump. The lips and skin start to turn blue. Air may not come into the lungs for up to a minute. And for some patients, the heart stops beating for almost 10 seconds at a time.
Eventually, the brain gets the urgent message that the body is choking. The brain jolts awake and the body instinctively gasps for air. Yet as soon as the airway is clear, the brain immediately falls back to sleep. That's when the cycle starts again. It is all so quick that it can happen more than 20 times an hour, all night long, without the sleeper remembering it the next day.
Someone lying next to him or her, however, can hear this process at work: when the rhythmic sawing of a snorer's breath pauses and then becomes a hard ghhack-ghhack-ghhack, it's most likely the body frantically clearing its airway.
Sleep apnoea was discovered when a group of US physicians noticed that some obese patients complained of overwhelming fatigue and would drift asleep unintentionally. With a literary flourish, they named the condition Pickwickian syndrome after a character who falls asleep standing up in Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers.
Doctors incorrectly attributed the sleepiness to a combination of excess weight and abnormally high levels of carbon dioxide in the blood. It was only later that science understood sleep apnoea to be a common breathing disorder caused by the position of the tongue and tissues of the throat. It was then given the name apnoea, from the Greek word for breathless.
Sleep apnoea was on the frontier of sleep medicine in the late 1970s. Sullivan had returned from a fellowship in Toronto, where he spent three years studying the breathing patterns of dogs while they slept. English bulldogs, pugs, and other breeds with pushed-in faces are the only animals besides humans that have sleep apnoea.
The years spent working with dogs gave Sullivan an idea. Once back in Sydney, he devised a mask that fitted over a dog's snout. The mask continuously pumped in air from the surrounding room, increasing the air pressure in the throat and preventing it from closing up. Experiments with dogs suggested the steady flow of air dramatically improved sleep. All Sullivan needed was a human to try it on.
In June 1980, he found one. A man walked into the hospital with such a severe case of sleep apnoea that Sullivan recommended an immediate tracheotomy. This procedure, which consisted of making a hole in the throat to allow a person to breathe without using the nose or mouth, was one of the few approved treatments for sleep apnoea at the time. It required a permanent, quarter-size opening in the neck, however, and was quite painful.
The patient refused the tracheotomy - but he was happy to volunteer as a test patient for Sullivan's air-pressure machine.
Sullivan built a test model that afternoon. He grabbed the engine out of a vacuum cleaner and attached it to a handful of plastic tubes. He then took a diving mask and coated the edges with a silicone sealant that prevented air from leaking out of it. Soon, he had a system that allowed him to pump air through the mask at a controlled pressure.
Sullivan found an empty room in the hospital and set up equipment to monitor the patient's breathing and brain waves, which would tell him what stage of sleep the man was in. The patient was hooked up to the monitors, put on the mask, and fell asleep almost instantly.
He began experiencing sleep apnoea within a few minutes. Sullivan then slowly started to increase the pressure in the air flowing through the mask and into the patient's airway. Suddenly, the apnoea stopped. The patient began breathing normally.
As Sullivan watched, the patient instantly went into deep REM sleep - a rare phenomenon suggesting his brain had been starved of restorative sleep. Sullivan then decreased the pressure of the air flowing through the mask. The apnoea returned.
Sullivan rapidly went through several cycles of increasing and decreasing the pressure. He found that with the machine's controls alone, he could effectively turn the patient's sleep apnoea on and off.
The machine worked. The next question was whether its benefits would last all night. Sullivan left the settings on the machine at a level where the patient was free of sleep apnoea. Then he waited. For about seven straight hours, the patient was in abnormally intense, deep sleep. When he woke the next day, he told Sullivan that he felt awake and alert for the first time in years.
A study in 1994 found that about 10 per cent of women and 25 per cent of men have difficulties breathing in their sleep. These numbers climb as a person gets older, so that as many as one in three elderly men have at least a mild case of sleep apnoea. Its cause could simply be the trade-off that the human body makes for having the ability to speak in a complex language.
A short tour of fossils illustrates this point. If you were to look at a Neanderthal's mouth, you might think that its descendants would have been the ones to survive over the long run, considering their jawbones were larger and stronger than our own. Plus, with extra room in their mouths, Neanderthals never experienced the pain of impacted wisdom teeth. Homo sapiens differed from Neanderthals by developing a flatter face, a smaller jawbone, and a tongue that descends deeper into the throat than in any other mammal. With this new hardware, humans were able to move beyond making simple grunts. Those first, complicated sounds uttered by Homo sapiens soon developed into language
But the positioning of the tongue in the Homo sapiens mouth complicates the acts of eating, drinking and breathing. Food could literally go down the wrong pipe, a biological problem unique to modern humans. Darwin noted ''the strange fact that every particle of food and drink we swallow has to pass over the orifice of the trachea with some risk of falling into the lungs''. The longer tissues of the soft palate at the back of the throat made it possible for the airway to become blocked after a routine exhalation, which could start the cycle of sleep apnoea.
In the mid-1990s, researchers in Japan found that slight changes in the size and position of the pharynx at the back of the throat drastically increased the likelihood that someone would develop a breathing disorder during sleep. The shape of a person's neck and jaw can also be a factor. A large neck, tongue, or tonsils, or a narrow airway often signal that a person will develop sleep apnoea because of the increased chance that breathing will become blocked during the night.
And yet the physicians who first recognised sleep apnoea were half right when they assumed the disorder was a side effect of obesity. Sleep apnoea is a flaw that is part of the blueprint of the human body, and excess fat often teases it out. The chances of developing sleep apnoea go up with weight because the tissues in the throat become enlarged, making it more likely that they will obstruct the airway during sleep.
For some patients, losing weight alone can solve the problem. Other changes in behaviour, like drinking less alcohol, cutting back on smoking, sleeping on one's side instead of on the back, or doing exercises or playing musical instruments that build up the muscles in the throat, can also help.
Breathing masks like those manufactured by ResMed, the company Sullivan co-founded in 1989 after developing simpler prototypes of his machine, are the most common medical treatment for sleep apnoea, but they are not for everyone.
Some patients never get used to the awkward sensation of sleeping with a mask on their face or never become comfortable with breathing in the cold air that is continuously pumped into their mouth. In the long term, patients with mild sleep apnoea wear the masks between 40 and 80 per cent of the time, according to various studies.
There is also a social stigma that complicates treatment. Some patients with sleep apnoea decide not to use a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine because they are worried it will make them less attractive to the person they are sharing a bed with.
In an online support group for patients with sleep apnoea, a man wrote that he was ''feeling like I am going to be Darth Vader if I have to wear one''. A woman wrote that her husband ''fought it, cried, said he is defective, said he would prefer to put a gun to his head then wear one of those things''.
Dental devices are typically the next choice. These are not as effective as CPAP machines, but they may be easier for some patients to use, especially those who have to travel frequently. One of the most popular looks like a sports mouthguard. It forces the lower jaw forward and slightly down to keep the airway open. Another device holds the tongue in place to prevent it from getting in the way.
Surgery is the last option. One procedure, called an uvulopalatopharyngoplasty, consists of removing excess soft tissue from the back of the throat. Its long-term success rate is only about 50 per cent, and it can lead to side effects such as difficulties swallowing, an impaired sense of smell, and infection. It is also extremely painful. Few medications have been shown to help sleep apnoea and may in fact make the problem worse. Sleeping pills and tranquilisers, for instance, can make the soft tissues in the throat sag and obstruct the airway more than they would otherwise.
In 2000, four separate studies found conclusive evidence that sleep apnoea was associated with increased rates of hypertension. Left untreated, patients with sleep apnoea are at a greater risk of developing kidney disease or vision problems, or having a heart attack or stroke.
Those studies helped convince government insurance programs to pay for a portion of the cost of each ResMed device, which can be several-thousand dollars if a patient were to buy it out of pocket. Sleep labs now conduct overnight tests in which patients who are suspected to have sleep apnoea are hooked up to equipment that monitors their hearts, breathing patterns, and brain activity, as well as the number of times they wake up through the night and how often they move their limbs.
As scientists began to understand sleep apnoea in more depth, they started to see it as the foundation for serious illnesses affecting the mind.
In one study, researchers at UCLA conducted brain scans of patients with long histories of sleep apnoea and compared them with the scans of control subjects who had normal sleep patterns. The investigations focused their inquiry on the mammillary bodies, two structures on the underside of the brain so named because they resemble small breasts. Mammillary bodies are thought to be an important part of the memory and have long been associated with cases of amnesia. This memory centre of the brain was 20 per cent smaller in patients with sleep apnoea.
Had a doctor looked at a patient's brain scan alone, it would have suggested severe cognitive impairment: a similar shrinkage in the size of the mammillary bodies is found in patients with Alzheimer's disease or those who experienced memory loss as a result of alcoholism. It was the first indication that sleep apnoea leaves a scar beyond the daily difficulties of focus and attention that come with sleepiness.
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association supported this conclusion. Kristine Yaffe, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California-San Francisco, led a study that recruited about 300 elderly women who were mentally and physically fit. The average age of the subjects in the study was 82. Each woman spent a night in a sleep lab, and Yaffe found that about one in every three met the standard for sleep apnoea.
She re-examined each woman five years later. The effects of age on the mind seemed to depend on the quality of sleep. Almost half of the women with sleep apnoea showed signs of mild cognitive impairment or dementia, compared with only a third of the women who slept normally. After controlling for factors such as age, race, and the use of medicines, Yaffe found that the women with sleep apnoea were 85 per cent more likely to show the first signs of memory loss.
The frequent interruptions in sleep and the reduced oxygen in the brain may reduce the brain's ability to form and protect long-term memories.
Sleep apnoea and weight are not problems limited to the the West - a fact that hasn't been lost on companies like ResMed.
The spread of Western fast-foods like McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut to emerging countries such as China and India may be the greatest growth engine for ResMed. Simply put, more fat in the bodies of the world's population equals a larger number of sleep apnoea cases, creating a larger customer base for ResMed.
''Genetically you're still engineered for a low-calorie, low-fat diet,'' Kieran Gallahue, the CEO of ResMed at the time I visited the company's headquarters in 2010, told me. ''That's what your body has been optimised for over centuries. Boom, you introduce burgers, and your body is not going to handle it. One of the outcomes is going to be a skyrocketing in the prevalence of sleep-disordered breathing.''
This is an edited extract from Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep by David Randall (WW Norton).
The Washington Post
RE: A sleeping timebomb - Moriarty - 08-26-2012
You find a lot of good stuff Zonk..
RE: A sleeping timebomb - mjbearit - 08-26-2012
So basically what you are saying here is that hoseheads are just more evolved!
RE: A sleeping timebomb - EyesWideOpen - 08-26-2012
Very interesting article, Zonk.
Thanks!
RE: A sleeping timebomb - trish6hundred - 08-26-2012
Hey zonk, thanks for posting this article.
RE: A sleeping timebomb - lonnieb - 08-26-2012
WOW!! zonk what a good post
RE: A sleeping timebomb - Itsadryheat - 08-26-2012
Consistently great posts! Thanks Zonk!
RE: A sleeping timebomb - zonk - 09-30-2012
![[Image: Christmas_lead-420x0.jpg]](http://images.smh.com.au/2011/12/12/2833496/Christmas_lead-420x0.jpg)
Too much partying can take its toll on our sleep patterns
_______________________________________________________________
Sydney Morning Herald - December 12, 2011
Ten steps to a good sleep
If you want to be at your best this festive season, it's crucial to get enough sleep. Kayte Nunn offers some shut-eye strategies.
With the party season in full swing and late nights, socialising and alcohol taking their toll, a lot of people are feeling tired and looking forward to catching up on some ZZZs during the holidays.
Lack of sleep affects our concentration, memory, physical performance, even our immune system - and you're also more likely to have an accident if you are sleep deprived.
A recent survey of 1500 Australians, by the Sleep Health Foundation, found most were getting about an hour's less sleep than the recommended average of eight hours and that the 18- to 24-year-olds were the ones most lacking in sleep. Thirty-five per cent of the respondents reported that they woke frequently through the night.
SNOOZE SABOTEURS
So why have you been struggling to get a good night's rest? A room that's too bright, noisy or warm; too much red wine with a heavy dinner; stress; shift work; depression; having a new baby; even irregular sleep habits - all of these can interfere with our ability to get some quality pillow time. Unfortunately, the effects of these can be cumulative, making it harder for us to regularly and effectively recharge and, potentially, setting us up for chronic insomnia.
NIGHT CYCLES
Though the amount of sleep needed varies from person to person, one thing we all have in common is that our sleep is never eight hours of solid shut-eye: "People need to realise that sleep is not one long valley of unconsciousness across the whole night,'' the director of Adelaide's Flinders University sleep laboratory, Professor Leon Lack, says.
''We go into deep sleep over a period of an hour but after an hour and a half we come into a period of lighter sleep, rapid eye movement or dreaming sleep for a short period of time and then we cycle back into deep sleep.''
It is common to wake up briefly as you come into light sleep. Lack says it's important not to worry if this happens. "Usually, our first awakening might occur after about three or four hours of sleep, after about two or three sleep cycles, and then we fall asleep again and then wake again an hour or so later, throughout the night," he says.
A professor and sleep researcher at Victoria University, Dr Gerard Kennedy, says deep sleep is necessary for physical restoration: "People who do a lot of physical work, such as labourers, find that they have more deep sleep. Conversely, when we are doing a lot of thinking, we tend to have more REM [rapid eye movement] sleep, so it's been suggested that REM sleep is necessary for memory consolidation."
SLEEP STRATEGIES
If late nights at work, or parties, or a crying baby have left you feeling sleep-deprived, what's the best way to recharge your batteries?
Well, it seems that the Mediterranean siesta is a tradition with a strong basis in fact. According to Kennedy, our bodies are designed to have two sleeps per 24 hours - one longer night sleep and a shorter nap of about 30-45 minutes in the early afternoon.
Mothers with new bubs have long been advised to sleep when their baby does, regardless of the time of day, in order to ''catch up'' on missed zees. During these ''power naps'' we don't go into a deep sleep but it's enough to leave us mentally refreshed and able to carry on for the rest of the day.
The key is not to sleep longer than 45 minutes, in order not to disrupt our natural body clock. We've yet to meet a boss who approves of staff snoozing under the desk but you can make time at the weekend for a nanna nap and still be sure of a good sleep at night.
REST EASY
What if you just cannot sleep? According to a sleep physician and chair of the Sleep Health Foundation, David Hillman, "a problem a lot of poor sleepers have is being in bed and not sleeping well, so in that instance it can often be better to get up and go to a quiet, dark place".
Hillman says when you feel ready to sleep again, go back to the bedroom. He too advocates that resting is important.
US sleep expert, Dr Matthew Edlund, says that rest can be just as beneficial as sleep for our wellbeing but not ''passive'' rest such as watching TV. In his book The Power of Rest: Why Sleep Alone is Not Enough he recommends a mix of mental, social and physical rest that utilises meditation, social engagement and breathing exercises.
TEN STEPS TO GOOD SLUMBER
1. Ensure your environment is conducive to a good night's rest. Have a comfortable mattress and pillow in a quiet, dark room. Make sure you are warm (but not hot) and the room is well ventilated (but not cold).
2. If you're worried about something, write it down before you go to sleep. Stress contributes to insomnia.
3. Regular exercise does wonders for sleep quality - but not just before bed.
4. A large meal or too much alcohol before bed might have you tossing and turning during the night. Don't eat within two hours of trying to sleep.
5. Avoid consuming caffeine in the afternoon and evening.
6. Take time to wind down from the day and relax. Don't watch a disturbing movie or do something mentally taxing.
7. Wear an eye mask if you're waking too early or your bedroom becomes too bright in the morning.
8. Use your bed for sleeping, not working on your laptop or watching TV.
9. Try relaxation techniques such as a progressive muscle relaxation or a visualisation technique if you're wide-eyed in the middle of the night.
10. Try to get up at the same time each day. Weekend sleep-ins can interrupt your body clock and make it hard to get to sleep during the week.
SLEEP APNOEA
Sleep apnoea is a different matter, Dr Lack says: ''It's due, mainly, to mechanical problems in the upper airway. The clinical symptoms of sleep apnoea are usually more that people are actually quite sleepy during the day and fall asleep quite easily, with loud snoring and occasional gasping noises.
''They have difficulty getting into deeper sleep. They experience a lot of brief awakenings and progress into deep sleep keeps getting interrupted whenever they have a breathing blockage. That has to be treated with a number of different techniques, the most common of which is a CPAP machine - a mask over the nose with a device that pumps air into their airways and expands the airway so it doesn't collapse when they are asleep.''
If you think you might have sleep apnoea symptoms, speak to your GP.
TAKE A TABLET?
If we're having problems sleeping, should we pop a pill? The director of the Flinders University Sleep Research Laboratory in Adelaide, Dr Leon Lack, doesn't consider sleeping tablets useful when treating long-term insomnia. He says using them regularly makes the tablets less effective. Instead, Lack advocates limiting the time spent in bed to build a ''sleep debt'', which will ensure better sleep and much less time spent awake in bed.
RE: A sleeping timebomb - Bernie - 09-30-2012
Great thread! I've read a lot of message threads on this forum, but I don't know how I missed this one until now.
Do you have any information on "lucid dreaming" and any relation they might have to sleep apnea or to the use of CPAP or APAP machines? I've had occasional lucid dreams just before awakening, but lately, I seem to have them a lot more often, even in the middle of the night.
RE: A sleeping timebomb - zonk - 10-01-2012
(09-30-2012, 08:26 PM)Bernie Wrote: Great thread! I've read a lot of message threads on this forum, but I don't know how I missed this one until now.
Do you have any information on "lucid dreaming" and any relation they might have to sleep apnea or to the use of CPAP or APAP machines? I've had occasional lucid dreams just before awakening, but lately, I seem to have them a lot more often, even in the middle of the night.
Changes in dreaming induced by CPAP in severe obstructive sleep apnea syndrome patients
Abstract
To study dream content in patients with severe obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) and its modification with Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) therapy.
We assessed twenty consecutive patients with severe OSAS and 17 healthy controls.
Polysomnograms were recorded at baseline in patients and controls and during the CPAP titration night, 3 months after effective treatment and 2 years later in patients.
Subjects were awakened 5-10 min after the beginning of the first and last rapid eye movement (REM) sleep periods and we measured percentage of dream recall, emotional content of the dream, word count, thematic units, sleep architecture and REM density.
Dream recall in REM sleep was similar in patients at baseline and controls (51.5% versus 44.4% respectively; P = .421), decreased to 20% and 24.3% the first and third month CPAP nights, and increased to 39% 2 years later (P = 0.004).
Violent/highly anxious dreams were only seen in patients at baseline. Word count was higher in patients than in controls. REM density was highest the first CPAP night. Severe OSAS patients recall dreams in REM sleep as often as controls, but their dreams have an increased emotional tone and are longer.
Despite an increase in REM density, dream recall decreased the first months of CPAP and recovered 2 years later.
Violent/highly anxious dreams disappeared with treatment.
A dream recall decrease with CPAP is associated with normalization of sleep in OSAS patients.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17118100