Sleep disorders

Tema	Anglų kalba
Tipas	Topikas
Aprašymas	About 90 percent of adults sleep 6 to 9 hours per night, with the largest number sleeping 8 to 9 hours. While some people sleep only 6 to 7 hours, most of these people have measurable signs of sleepiness during the daytime, even if they do not realize it. It appears that 8 to 9 hours of sleep are required by most people to be free from daytime sleepiness. A sleep disorder exists whenever the inability to sleep well produces weakened daytime functioning or excessive sleepiness.
Patalpinta	2005-05-09
Parsisiuntė	203
	Parsisiųsti6 KB

Išsamus aprašymas

INSOMNIA The term insomnia is used in reference to complaints about a symptom, namely, dissatisfaction with the amount or quality of one’s sleep. Whether or not a person has insomnia is almost always a subjective decision. A difficult feature of insomnia is that people seem to overestimate their sleep loss. One study that monitored the sleep of people who identified themselves as insomniacs found that only about half of them were actually awake as much as 30 minutes during the night. The problem may be that light or restless sleep sometimes fells like wakefulness or that some people remember only time spent awake and think they have not slept because they have no memory of doing so.
NARCOLEPSY AND APNEA Two relatively rare but severe sleep disorders are narcolepsy and apnea. A person with narcolepsy may fall asleep while writing a letter, driving a car, or carrying on a conversation. Individuals with this dysfunction have recurring, irresistible attacks of drowsiness (apsnūdimas). These episodes can occur several times a day in severe cases, and last from a few second to 15-30 minutes. Essentially, narcolepsy is the intrusion (įsibrovimas) of REM episodes into daytime hours. During attacks victims go quickly into a REM state, so rapidly in fact that they may lose muscle control and collapse (smarkiai nusilpti) before they can lie down, they may report experiencing hallucinations. Narcolepsy runs in families, and there is evidence that a specific gene or combination of genes confers susceptibility (teikia jautruma) to the disorder. In sleep apnea the individual stops breathing while asleep. There are two reasons for apnea attacks. One reason is that the brain fails to send a “breathe” signal to the diaphragm and other breathing muscles, thus causing breathing to stop. The other reason is that muscles art the top of the throat become too relaxed, allowing the windpipe (gerklė, trachėja) to partially close, thereby forcing the breathing muscles to pull harder on incoming air, which causes the airway to completely collapse. During an apnea, the oxygen level of the blood drops dramatically, leading to the secretion of emergency hormones. This reaction causes the sleeper to awaken in order to begin breathing again. Most people have a few apneas a night, but people with severe sleep problems may have several hundred apneas per night. With each apnea they wake up in order to resume breathing, but these arousals are so brief they are generally unaware of doing so. The result is that those who suffer from apnea can spend 12 or more hours in bed each night and still be so sleepy the next day that they cannot function and will fall asleep even in the middle of a conversation. Sleep apnea is common among older men. Not waking up is probably one of the main reasons people die in their sleep.
SLEEP DEPRIVATION (miego atėmimas, netekimas) . The need for sleep seems so important that we might expect being deprived of sleep for several nights to have serious consequences. Numerous studies have shown, however, that the only consistent effects of sleep deprivation are drowsiness, a desire to sleep, and a tendency to fall asleep easily. Subjects kept awake for 50 hours or more show nothing more noticeable than transient inattentions, confusions, or misperceptions. Even sleepless periods exceeding four days produce little in the way of severely disturbed behavior. In one study in which a subject was kept awake for 11 days and nights, there were no unusually deviant responses. Intellectual activities such as answering short test questions seem unaffected by several nights of sleep deprivation.
ADVICE FOR A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP.
• Establish a regular schedule of going to bed and getting up
• Stay away form caffeinated drinks like coffee or cola for several hours before bedtime. Drink milk.
• Don’t eat heavily before going to bed
• Regular exercise will help you sleep better
• Relax before bedtime, avoid stressful thoughts

Raktiniai žodžiai

• disturbed awake zodzei
• insomnia vokiskai
• consequences of several nights of no sleep