Doctors Slowly Awaken to Problems Often Caused by Recurring Sleep Disorders : Medicine: Gaps in breathing, seizures and chronic fatigue are some of the costs. Getting enough rest has been found to be essential to health.

It was 4 a.m. when Anthony Scudiero started to gag on his own saliva.

“My wife was sleeping light that night or it would have been sayonara , Scudiero,” recalled the 60-year-old restaurant owner from Overland Park, Kan.

An unconscious Scudiero was whisked by ambulance to a hospital, where he underwent a battery of tests in November. Doctors determined that Scudiero had had a seizure, but they weren’t sure why.

“My doctor suggested I go to St. Luke’s Sleep Lab,” Scudiero said. “That’s where they figured out that several times a night I would just stop breathing, about 33 times an hour. One time I stopped for 36 seconds.”

Scudiero is one of an estimated 10% to 15% of Americans with a sleep disorder, says Dr. Ann Romaker, director of St. Luke’s Sleep Disorders Lab. His is called sleep apnea.

Scudiero’s seizure was brought on either because the apnea interrupted his sleep cycle and left him severely sleep deprived, or because it caused his oxygen level to drop dangerously low, Romaker says.

“Not everyone with apnea is going to have a seizure,” she said. “But it is not that unusual. Sleep problems can lead to loads of other difficulties.”

After a night in the Sleep Lab, Scudiero was fitted with a c-pap, or continuous positive airflow passage machine, that fits around his nose and regulates his breathing. It seems to have solved his problem.

“I’m sleeping with this machine and have more energy,” he says. “I can stay up later and get up earlier without feeling so worn out.”

Though the study of sleep is only in its infancy, there is a growing interest in sleep deprivation as a medical problem, Romaker says.

About 10 years ago, doctors realized they were seeing several cases of sleep apnea, which probably was affecting patients’ health and leading to complications such as hypertension and heart disease, not to mention strained relationships, diminished work performance and accidents, she said.

When Romaker joined St. Luke’s in 1988, the sleep lab was treating about 250 patients. By 1990, the figure had doubled to 500. By 1991, 750 people came to the lab for help.

In 1992, Romaker projects that the four-bed lab will treat about 1,200 patients, for everything from insomnia and sleepwalking to conditions such as sleep apnea and narcolepsy, a condition in which the patient continually nods off but rarely feels rested.

Romaker says most people need about eight hours of sleep a night, and about 35% of the population has continuing difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep. Thousands of others live with constant fatigue, she says.

“We’re a society that tends to think of sleep as a waste of time,” Romaker said, “but it’s not. Not sleeping the right amount--that is the waste of time.

“Apart from cardiac problems and high blood pressure, we are just starting to realize the importance of sleep as a medical problem,” she said. “A lot of highway accidents happen at night, when people should be sleeping. Airplane accidents, train wrecks, all could be minimized if we took into account the number of hours of sleep these drivers and pilots are getting.

“Even nuclear accidents. Look at all the big ones. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl both happened between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., when people running the shows should have been in bed,” she said.

Some doctors still don’t understand the prevalence of sleep disorders and how to diagnose them, Romaker said.

“It’s not uncommon for me to see patients who tell me how relieved they are that a doctor finally understands what they’re going through,” she said. “They’ve thought they were terminally ill or going crazy or something.

“Then I take a sleep history, or get them hooked up in the lab for a night and find out what’s the matter, prescribe some medication if that’s needed, and they feel normal again.

“We have to take sleep and sleep problems seriously. It can be very frustrating to hear doctors ask me, ‘What is it you do up there?’

“There is still a lot of education needed to get society feeling good by sleeping right.”