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Sleep And Actigraphy: What Does It Means?

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Sleep is a subjective phenomenon in which each individual is unique with respect to their interpretation of what normal or good sleep means to them. There has been continuous debate concerning what normal sleep means and how it is defined. It is important to understand that the physiology of sleep is constantly evolving in many individuals. For instance, sleep patterns change as one ages. While children have a greater ratio of NREM sleep in comparison to adults, adults demonstrate a greater ratio of REM sleep, compared to children. In addition to age differences, gender has also been shown to demonstrate differences in sleep, most notably in adults. For example, it has been shown that women tend to have a higher percentage of slow wave sleep (SWS) than men. Nevertheless, it is still unclear what determines the definition of normal sleep (1). A multitude of methods and tools have been created to measure normal sleep, both subjective and objective. This includes questionnaires, diaries, …show more content…

Actigraphy is useful providing information about daily variability and sleep quality. Additionally, it records sleep data in the home environment (5). This is important because most individuals have their best sleep in their normal sleep environment, which allows increased accuracy. Likewise, the results of data collection are not influenced by a patient’s poor memory, expectations, or recall bias. Finally, its comparability to PSG is beneficial because actigraphy is less expensive than PSG to administer (5). Disadvantages of actigraphy include its limited usefulness in assessing sleep onset latency (SOL). Furthermore, actigraphy is more expensive than administration of sleep diaries. To enhance the quality of actigraphy data, it is recommended that patients complete sleep diaries in addition to actigraphy measurements (5). This is a disadvantage because it increases the amount of work a patient is required to

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