Continued from previous message...

   Why does sleep cause all this trouble?  First, we don't sleep
   standing up.  The customary sleeping posture--lying flat--alters
   circulation, especially in the lungs, where oxygen and carbon
   dioxide are exchanged.  If you are overweight, the fat on your
   abdomen compresses your lungs.  Think how hard it would be to
   blow up a balloon if someone was squeezing it.

   Furthermore, muscle tone falls during sleep.  During REM
   periods, most muscles "turn off."  If we are going to run into
   difficulty breathing during sleep, REM is our most vulnerable
   time.  People most susceptible to this problem are those in
   whome the muscles involved in breathing have been weakened by
   disease or time (the elderly) or those whose the muscles are
   still immature (babies in their first months of life).  This
   problem is a prime suspect in many cases of sudden and
   unexpected death during sleep, including those of the young
   victims of the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), sometimes
   referred to as crib death.

   Anyone may have occasional brief pauses in breathing during the
   night, particularly just as sleep begins or along with bursts of
   rapid eye movements.  However, in healthy people these pauses do
   not occur over and over again and they never last longer than
   thirty seconds.

   People with breathing disorders may stop breathing during sleep
   more than one hundred times per hour all night long, in both
   REM and NREM sleep.  These people may not breathe at all for
   three quarters of their time asleep.  Some pauses have been
   recorded that lasted over three minutes, a striking length of
   time, since four minutes without oxygen often results in
   irreversible brain damage.

   Cessations in breathing that last ten seconds or longer are
   termed "apneas," from the Greek word meaning "want of breath."
   When thirty or more apneas appear in seven hours of sleep,
   producing excessive sleepiness and other ill effects during the
   day, a person is said to have the sleep apnea syndrome.

   This disorder can start at any age, although it becomes more
   common as we get older.  Over half the people who have it are
   forty or over when it is discovered.

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    - Origin: Paul's Waka Waka BBS 206-783-7979 Seattle, Wa. (1:343/117)



--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+