A Psychophysiological Study of Nightmares and Night Terrors

Anxiety and sleep after fosazepam.

“…The onset of sleep occurred sooner, it lasted longer and was less broken. There was a progressive and persisting decline of slow wave sleep, as has been reported in the case of chronic intake of flurazepam (Kales, Kales, Bixler & Slye, 1971), diazepam (Fisher, Kahn, Edwards & Davis, 1973;Kales & Scharf, 1973), flunidazepam, also known as flunitrazepam or Ro 5-4200 (Oswald, Lewis, Tagney, Firth & Haider, 1973;Monti, Trenchi, Morales & Monti, 1974), chlordiazepoxide (Hartmann & Cravens, 1973) and observed in recent unpublished studies of nitrazepam in this laboratory. REM sleep is not dramatically affected by most benzodiazepines but, at least with heavier doses, some reduction is brought about (Oswald & Priest, 1965;Kales, Kales, Scharf & Tan, 1 970a;Hartmann & Cravens, 1973) and evidence of this can be found in the first 6 h of sleep of our subjects.…”

Nocturnal panic and trauma

“…The person with NP may experience more "arousals" during sleep as a function of anxiety. That is, there is evidence that anxious persons tend to have heightened arousal during sleep, manifested in more awakenings [Roy-Byrne et al, 1988], more body movements, increased vasoconstriction, higher body temperature, higher heart rate, more heart rate variability, increased muscle twitching, and even "disorderly bursts" of arousal [e.g., Anastasiades et al, 1988;Broughton, 1968;Fisher et al, 1973;Lavie et al, 1979] in comparison to nonanxious controls. Another possibility is that the physiological events preceding NP represent manifestations of specific autonomic or central nervous system dysregulation, such as hypersensitive CO 2 receptors, chronic hyperventilation, or exacerbation of the drive for relaxation.…”

The Development of Sleep Medicine: A Historical Sketch

“…Much later, in the EEG era of sleep medicine, it was established that somnambulism and night terror arise out of deep NREM sleep and both represent disorders of arousal. 83 Fisher et al 84 performed clinical studies in which they interviewed subjects, who had actually a terror episode, for any mental content that preceded the event. In many cases, it seemed probable that the night terror episode was a reaction to the mental content of the preceding deep delta sleep phase; however, it was also shown that night terrors could be elicited artificially by external stimuli such as sounding a buzzer.…”