subject: Do You Observe Any Changes In Your Sleeping Patterns [print this page] Sleep disorders in simple medical terms can be defined as a medical disorder of the sleeping pattern of a person or animal. Sleeping disorder may involve any difficulty related with sleeping that includes difficulty in falling or staying asleep, falling asleep at abnormal times, excessive total sleep time or abnormal behavior due to sleeping pattern. There are at least 100 identified sleep/wake disorders but the common types of sleep disorders associated with a person include-
Hypersomnia,
Insomnia,
Bruxism,
Dyssomnias,
Narcolepsy
Sleep apnea
A normal healthy person requires about seven to eight hours of sleep each night in order to feel refreshed and to function at their optimum levels. The Sleep in America Polls conducted on behalf of the National Sleep Foundation NSF- provided a snapshot view of the sleeping disorders being faced by the Americans. This survey reported that about 20% of Americans get less than six hours of sleep on an average and the number of Americans reporting that they get eight hours or more of sleeping hours is decreasing.
Role and history of Sleep Disorder Centers-
There are over 200 accredited sleep disorder centers and research laboratories in the United States that are designed to research, recognize and treat all types of sleep disorder. In the year-1961, the organized sleep medicine research in the United States began with the establishment of the Association for the Psycho physiological Study of Sleep (APSS) consisting of a group of clinical sleep researchers. Later on in the year- 1970, William Dement founded the Stanford University Research Center which is the first of its kind and can be regarded as the parent of the national clinical sleep disorder centers for the diagnosis and treatment of patients with sleep disorders.
The Association of Sleep Disorder Centers or ASDC was founded in 1976, which was primarily established as a nationally recognized accreditation process for these centers in the United States. Among the numerous sleep disorder centers that were established in United States, the first to be accredited in the U.S.A by the American Sleep Disorders Association is the Montefiore Sleep Disorder Center- Bronx- New York in the year- 1977. It is affiliated with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx- New York.
At present, numerous sleeping disorder centers that are spread in all of the states in the United States of America and many of them had obtained accreditation from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
