DSPS, a sleep disorder

Several researchers have been mentioned / cited here, and there’ll surely be more.  They are listed below. 

Bjorvatn, Bjørn (in post vii.), is a sleep researcher at the University in Bergen, Norway, and a co-founder of Bergen Sleep Center.

Czeisler, Charles A. (in post xliii.) has been researching circadian rhythms for several decades.

Dagan, Yaron  (in post xxxviii.) in Israel, often publishing together with Judith Abadi, stated in 2001: “Certain sleep-wake schedule disorders (SWSDs) cannot be successfully managed clinically (…).  …we propose new medical terminology for such cases–SWSD disability. SWSD disability is an untreatable pathology of the circadian time structure…  It is imperative that physicians recognize the medical condition of SWSD disability in their patients and bring it to the notice of the public institutions responsible for vocational and social rehabilitation.”  In almost all of his papers, he emphasizes that people with circadian rhythm disorders often are misdiagnosed because physicians don’t know (enough) about such disorders.  Here is a case study (abstract) about a 14-year-old boy whose other diagnoses fell as soon as his sleep disorder was diagnosed.  It should perhaps be obvious that I appreciate Dagan’s work and his opinion. 

DeCoursey, Patricia (in post xix.), is the grand old, grand old of the field of chronobiology.  In 1960 she invented the Phase Response Curve when the “daily” activity rhythms of her flying squirrels, kept in constant darkness, responded to pulses of light exposure. The response varied according to the time of day — that is, the animals’ subjective “day” — when light was administered. When DeCoursey plotted all her data relating the quantity and direction (advance or delay) of phase-shift on a single curve, she created the PRC. It has since been a standard tool in the study of biological rhythms.

Dijk and Lockley (in post v.).  Derk-Jan Dijk and Steven W. Lockley often publish together.  Dijk, who studies the regulation of sleep and circadian rhythms in humans, is director of the Surrey Sleep Research Centre in the UK.  Lockley, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Associate Neuroscientist in Sleep Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the USA, is particularly interested in the effects of light on the circadian pacemaker in humans.

Horne and Östberg (in post xxxviii.) published their Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (MEQ) in 1976.   It is based on O. Öquist’s 1970 thesis at the Department of Psychology, University of Göteborg, Sweden: ”Kartläggning av individuella dygnsrytmer”, “Charting Individual Circadian Rhythms”.  This marks the beginning of modern research into chronotypes.  Olov Östberg modified Öquist’s questionnaire and, together with J. A. (Jim) Horne, he published the MEQ (pmid 1027738, abstract ) which still is used and referred to in virtually all research on this topic. 

Roenneberg, Till (in post xxxvii. and in post xlvii.), professor at the University of Munich, is one of the best-known chronobiologists in Europe, having received international prizes for both his research and his teaching.  He has built up the Centre for Chronobiology at the Munich Medical School with its database on the sleep of over 50 000 Europeans.  In 2008 in India he collaborated with and directed a project in Mangalore chronotyping the south Indian population, with data covering nearly 75 000 participants.  Roenneberg’s work ranges from the cellular/molecular mechanisms of the circadian clock to the consequences of shift work and, as mentioned, huge surveys.

Thorpy, Michael J. (post xxxii.), board certified in sleep medicine, is a sleep researcher and a professor of clinical neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.  He has held high office in the National Sleep Foundation and in the Sleep Section of the American Academy of Neurology.  Thorpy was for many years editor of The International Classification of Sleep Disorders: Diagnostic and Coding Manual (ICSD) and has been publishing books and articles since the 1980s.

Uchiyama, Makoto (in posts xxxviii. and xxvii.), professor at the Nihon University School of Medicine in Tokyo and managing editor of Sleep and Biological Rhythms, the official English language journal of the Japanese Society of Sleep Research (JSSR), is a prolific co-author of studies on sleep, particularly on DSPS and Non-24, often in cooperation with Masako Okawa, chair of the Asian Sleep Research Society. (ASRS).  This research field is very active in Japan, where study subjects often are people with these disorders.  In the west, in contrast, studies are more often done on healthy, normal people with results extrapolated to effects in people with the disorders.  The Japanese researchers have shown, for example, that the interval between the lowest core body temperature and spontaneous awakening is much longer in people with Non-24 and DSPS than the “about two hours” which is considered normal. 

Zivkovic, Bora, aka “Coturnix” (in posts xxxvii., xxxiii., xviii. and  xv.), should have had his PhD by now but the ideal job came along and his dissertation isn’t getting done.  He tells about that and about chronobiology and about lots more at ScienceBlogs. 

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Next:  xliii. Blindfolding the blind

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