Depression is characterized by sleep difficulties, but the extent to which subjective and objective sleep disturbances precede depression are unclear. This study was designed to examine perceptions of sleep quality in addition to actigraphy- and diary-measured sleep variables in healthy girls at low and high familial risk for major depressive disorder. Forty-four healthy daughters and their mot...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To assess usual nightly sleep duration of patients referred for a Multiple Sleep Latency Test (MSLT). DESIGN Retrospective chart review. SETTING Military, hospital-based, sleep center. PATIENTS Fifty-four patients with excessive daytime sleepiness referred for an MSLT. INTERVENTIONS None. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS Self-reported average nightly sleep duration (6.13 +/- 1...

We assessed the duration and severity of tremor in a real-life ambulatory setting in patients with psychogenic and organic tremor by actigraphy, and compared this with self-reports of tremor over the same period. Ten participants with psychogenic tremor and eight with organic tremor, diagnosed using standardized clinical criteria, were studied. In an explicit design, participants were asked to ...

OBJECTIVE Differences in sleep results due to the placement of actigraphy devices (non-dominant vs. dominant wrist) are yet to be determined. METHODS 65 nights of data from 13 adult participants was collected while participants wore two actigraphy devices, one on each wrist. Sleep indices including total sleep time (TST), total time in bed (TTB), sleep efficiency (SE%), sleep latency (SL), wa...

BACKGROUND Behavioural and functional activity monitoring has a long history in sleep research. The term "Actigraphy" refers to methods using computerized wristwatch-size devices (generally placed on the wrist, but also on the ankle or trunk) to record the movement it undergoes. Collected data are displayed on a computer and analyzed for change in rhythm parameters that in turn provide an estim...

The gold standards for measurement of sleep and wake are polysomnography (PSG) and the multiple sleep latency test (MSLT) and will remain so. Both tests are labor intensive and expensive when seen from the viewpoint of the sleep laboratory and a heavy burden for the patient, in particular for children and their parents. Furthermore, the use of MSLT in children is hampered by the lack of reliabl...