Our experiences with sleep-lab technology have been both impressive and disappointing — at much time and expense, patients are hooked into elaborate contraptions, to be monitored all night by staff and cameras and equipment. Yet the reams of generated data sometimes yield few clues as to what’s really wrong with the patient. That might begin to change, with the addition of a simple EKG, according to docs at Beth Israel Deaconness:

The new study, led by sleep researcher Robert Thomas, MD, of BIDMC’s Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine, identified two distinct types of behavior exhibited throughout the course of a person’s sleep, the first being stable and restful, the second being unstable and aroused. The results show that conventional approaches to categorize non-REM (non-rapid-eye-movement) sleep into grades of depth do not capture this potentially important dimension.
“Among healthy adults, physiological behaviors will show relatively abrupt shifts– occurring over minutes–between both stable and unstable sleep, but the stable stage clearly dominates,” explains Goldberger, who is also a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. “But,” he adds, “in a variety of disease states, the spectrogram shows that an unstable sleep pattern is predominant, and among patients with severe cases of sleep apnea, virtually all of the patient’s non-REM sleep is unstable.”

More from the exciting journal Sleep…

According to New Scientist, researchers at Johns Hopkins have a patent to treat nausea with an implantable metal rod. The implant would stimulate the vagus nerve in a pulsatile manner, adjustable to individual patients, and controlled by remote. The report (second item down) says:

A small metal rod, wrapped in a metallic coil, is inserted beneath the skin on a patient’s neck, close to the vagus nerve. When a similar coil is then held outside the neck and pulsed with low voltage current, the inserted rod should stimulate the vagus nerve and disrupt the sense of nausea felt by a patient.
JHU says that the strength and frequency of pulses must be set by a physician to suit the individual patient. But then a patient needs only to hold a battery-powered device to their neck and press a button when they feel uncontrollably sick.

One hopes that tinkering with this cranial nerve doesn’t affect its other functions, like slowing the heart. The Hopkins scientists assure us not to worry, but then again, they misspelled the title of their patent (“Method for Trating Nausea” ?)
More from the JHU patent(.PDF)…
Flashback: The body’s other brain…