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Palatine Heart Center
523 Old Northwest Highway,
Barrington, IL 60010
Phone (847) 381-1200
Fax (847) 381-1904 |
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Heart Lung Center
360 Station Drive
Crystal Lake, IL 60014
Phone (815) 477-8900
Fax (815) 477-7160 |
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| Sleep and Disease |
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| SLEEP AND DISEASE |
| Sleep and sleep-related problems play a role in a large number of human disorders and affect almost every field of medicine. Problems like stroke and asthma attacks tend to occur more frequently during the night and early morning, perhaps due to changes in hormones, heart rate and other characteristics associated with sleep. Sleep also affects some kinds of epilepsy in complex ways. REM sleep seems to help prevent seizures that begin in one part of the brain from spreading to other brain regions, while deep sleep may promote the spread of these seizures. Sleep deprivation also triggers seizures in people with some types of epilepsy. |
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| Sleep may help the body conserve energy and other resources that the immune system needs to mount an attack.
Neurons that control sleep interact closely with the immune system. As anyone who has had the flu knows, infectious diseases tend to make us feel sleepy. This probably happens because cytokines, chemicals our immune systems produce while fighting an infection, are powerful sleep-inducing chemicals. |
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| Sleeping problems occur in almost all people with mental disorders, including those with depression and schizophrenia. People with depression, for example, often awaken in the early hours of the morning and find themselves unable to get back to sleep. The amount of sleep a person gets also strongly influences the symptoms of mental disorders. Sleep deprivation can actually cause depression in other people. Extreme sleep deprivation can lead to a seemingly psychotic state of paranoia and hallucinations in otherwise healthy people and disrupted sleep can trigger episodes of mania (agitation and hyperactivity) in people with manic depression. |
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| Better management of sleeping problems could improve patients' health and quality of life. Sleeping problems are common in many diseases and disorders as well, including Alzheimer's disease, stroke, cancer and head injury. These sleeping problems may arise from changes in the brain regions and neurotransmitters that control sleep or from the drugs used to control symptoms of other disorders. In patients who are hospitalized or who receive round-the-clock care, treatment schedules or hospital routines also may disrupt sleep. Once sleeping problems develop, they can add to a person's impairment and cause confusion, frustration or depression. Patients who are unable to sleep also notice pain more and may increase their requests for pain medication. |
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