Sleep Technology

  Mary McKinley, R. EEG T., RPSGT, MA, is presenting the breakout session “Complementary and Integrative Therapies for the Management of Insomnia in Chronic Disease” at the AAST 2018 Annual Meeting, Sept. 28-30, 2018, in Indianapolis. We caught up with McKinley to discuss her background and the future of sleep medicine.

  I was a postdoctoral fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and had the pleasure of working with George Sacher. At the time, he was president of the Gerontological Society of America and had spent his life working on ways to increase lifespan. He was a proponent of hormesis, the idea that moderation was the path to a longer life. Of course, some things should be off the list, like a moderate amount of murder. 

The advent of actigraphy in the 1990s made it possible to indirectly record a person’s sleep-wake cycles based on the person’s activity level, with increased activity indicating wakefulness and decreased activity indicating sleep. In actigraphy, a device — an actigraph — which is typically worn on the wrist, continually records movement data over a prolonged time — one week or more. 

Every healthcare professional walks into the examination room with predetermined biases regarding the patients they see. Fifty-year-old obese man? OSA, of course. Twenty-year-old woman with daytime sleepiness? Could be narcolepsy. A man comes to the sleep center with his wife and she has a black eye? REM behavior disorder (RBD) is suddenly on your radar.

Professional athletes put their bodies through a lot. High-intensity competition, grueling travel schedules, late games — all of this makes good sleep hygiene crucial. A well-rested and recovered athlete plays better than a sleep-deprived one, and professional teams are starting to understand how the sleep health of their athletes impacts wins and losses. In the third installment of our Sports & Sleep series, we spoke with sleep and fatigue expert Pat Byrne about his work with the Vancouver Canucks and his company, Fatigue Science.

Professional athletes put their bodies through a lot. High-intensity competition, grueling travel schedules, late games — all of this makes good sleep hygiene crucial. A well-rested and recovered athlete plays better than a sleep-deprived one, and professional teams are starting to understand how the sleep health of their athletes impacts wins and losses. In the second installment of our Sports & Sleep series, we spoke with Dr. Christopher Winter, owner of Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine clinic and CNSM Consulting.

Professional athletes put their bodies through a lot. High-intensity competition, grueling travel schedules, late games — all of this makes good sleep hygiene crucial. A well-rested and recovered athlete plays better than a sleep-deprived one, and professional teams are starting to understand how the sleep health of their athletes impacts wins and losses. In the first installment of our Sports & Sleep series, we spoke with Amy Bender, MS, PhD., the clinical program director of athlete services at the Centre for Sleep & Human Performance.

Sleep problems can predispose individuals to many medical conditions. Conversely, medical disorders can lead to sleep disturbance. In fact, sleep disturbance represents one of the most challenging, yet exceptionally common problems faced in the primary care practice today.

I try to start my blogs in a lighthearted way, but there is nothing lighthearted about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as ALS. ALS is a group of progressive diseases of upper and lower motor neurons, resulting in weakness of muscles. The course is often rapid, with most people dying from respiratory failure within three to five years from the onset of symptoms. Patients have difficulty breathing due to weakness of respiratory muscles. As the disease progresses, patients may require tracheostomy and ventilation. There is no known treatment.

If your patient comes to you reporting poor quality of sleep, there's a good chance they may be suffering from sleep apnea. A few sleep study tests can usually help provide a diagnosis.