Getting to the heart of sleep

New York - Tracking beat-to-beat changes in the heart's electrical signals may allow researchers insights into sleep stability and quality, researchers report.

"This new ECG-based approach is important because it promises to provide an affordable and readily achievable way to monitor sleep stability in a wide range of conditions, including sleep apnea, depression, fibromyalgia, heart failure and stress," senior researcher Dr. Ary Goldberger of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, said in a prepared statement.

Reporting in the Sept. 1 issue of Sleep, Goldberger's team developed a "sleep spectrogram," a novel graph based on data obtained from a simple electrocardiogram (ECG).

Using this approach, they were able to identify two distinct types of behavior during a person's sleep -- stable and restful or unstable and aroused.

The graph provided more information about sleep depth than conventional methods using rapid eye movement, the researchers said. -- Health Day

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