Sleep is a complex biological process. It is a reversible state of unconsciousness in which there are reduced metabolism and motor activity. There are two different kinds of sleep: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-REM (NREM) sleep. Most young adults first enter NREM sleep from the drowsy state. NREM sleep (dreamless sleep) is further divided into three stages (previous guidelines included 4 stages, however, stages 3 and 4 are now subsumed under stage 3). The first stage N1 is the lightest...

Apnea and other breathing-related disorders have been linked to the development of hypertension or impairments of the cardiovascular, cognitive or metabolic systems. The combined assessment of multiple physiological signals acquired during sleep is of fundamental importance for providing additional insights about breathing disorder events and the associated impairments. In this work, we apply information-theoretic measures to describe the joint dynamics of cardiorespiratory physiological...

CONCLUSION: The pattern of results suggests that blending demographic, anthropometric, and subjective/objective sleep- and breathing-related data enabled more effective discrimination of individuals at higher risk for OSA. The results are of practical and clinical importance: demographic, anthropometric, and breathing-related issues derived from self-rating scales provide a quick and reliable identification of individuals at risk of OSA; objective assessments provide further certainty and...

Stroke is a leading cause of disability and mortality all over the world. Due to an aging population, the incidence of stroke is rising significantly, which has led to devastating consequences for patients. In addition to traditional risk factors such as age, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, diabetes and atrial fibrillation, sleep disorders, as independent modifiable risk factors for stroke, have been highlighted increasingly. In this review, we provide an overview of common types of current sleep...