Increasingly, there is a need in both research and clinical practice to document and quantify sleep and waking behaviors in a comprehensive manner. The Pittsburgh Sleep Diary (PghSD) is an instrument with separate components to be completed at bedtime and waketime. Bedtime components relate to the events of the day preceding the sleep, waketime components to the sleep period just completed. Two-week PghSD data is presented from 234 different subjects, comprising 96 healthy young middle-aged controls, 37 older men, 44 older women, 29 young adult controls and 28 sleep disorders patients in order to demonstrate the usefulness, validity and reliability of various measures from the instrument. Comparisons are made with polysomnographic and actigraphic sleep measures, as well as personality and circadian type questionnaires. The instrument was shown to have sensitivity in detecting differences due to weekends, age, gender, personality and circadian type, and validity in agreeing with actigraphic estimates of sleep timing and quality. Over a 12-31 month delay, PghSD measures of both sleep timing and sleep quality showed correlations between 0.56 and 0.81 (n = 39, P < 0.001).
ABSTRACT. Neonatal EEG and sleep findings are presented from a longitudinal study of the effects of maternal alcohol and marijuana use during pregnancy. Infant outcome has been examined relative to the trimester(s) of pregnancy during which use occurred. Disturbances in sleep cycling, motility, and arousals were noted that were both substance and trimester specific. Alcohol consumed during the first trimester of pregnancy was associated with disruptions in sleep and arousal, whereas marijuana use affected sleep and motility regardless of the trimester in which it was used. Although these findings are preliminary and based on a small sample of women exhibiting only moderate substance use during pregnancy, they do suggest that specific neurophysiological systems may be differentially affected by prenatal alcohol or marijuana exposure even in the absence of morphological abnormalities.
Summary: Despite the increasing application of all-night electroencephalographic (EEG) sleep studies to children for clinical as well as for research purposes, readily available normal EEG sleep standards for the period of childhood have remained sparse and, at present, reflect data on only approximately 100 children 6 to 16 years of age. As part of a large scale study examining various aspects of EEG sleep among children, findings derived using standard recording and scoring methods are reported for a new sample of nearly 100 normal, healthy children and are compared with existing standards. Data obtained add substantially to the existing database and generally confirm findings of previous normative reports on children in this age range. Key Words: EEG sleep--Standard measurement methods-Normal sleep, children.The objective measurement of human sleep using all-night recording methods represents an area of ongoing interest and activity, most notably~ince the discovery of REM sleep in 1953 (1,2). Although precise mechanisms have yet to be determined, work in this field has been both rich and diverse, contributing greatly to our present understanding of the complex processes involved in human sleep-wake cycles (3-6). Increasing interest in human sleep has been even more apparent in the last decade with the emergence of growing numbers of highly specialized clinical sleep facilities and the establishment of a working classification system for the sleep and arousal disorders (7). Thus, in addition to their continued application in research efforts to realize more fully the neurophysiological bases of sleep and the various sleep states, all-night electroencephalographic (EEG) sleep studies are being applied in the clinical assessment of a broad range of sleep-wake disturbances among individuals of all ages. These more recent activities have not only renewed interest in various aspects of "normal" sleep-wake behavior across the life span but have also highlighted the relative paucity of EEG sleep standards for certain age groups. Among children, for example, the most frequently referenced normative data include the preliminary observations of Roffwarg
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