Deep sleep therapy

The sleep therapy or duration of anesthesia was a common in the 1920s and 1930s form of treatment of schizophrenia.

The Swiss psychiatrist Jakob Klaesi (1883-1980) reported in 1922 in the Journal of psychiatry attempts to five - ten-day dream cures perform with the barbiturate Somnifen in schizophrenic patients. Since he mentioned some positive results, the method used in Germany. The treatment was very costly and resulted in inadequate maintenance to frequent deaths ( about ten percent of the patients).

Starting in 1936, the Sleep Therapy was supplanted by the new shock therapy ( electroconvulsive therapy ).

Today we often mean by sleep therapy and the treatment of sleep -disordered breathing (SDB ), as the obstructive or central sleep apnea, the obesity hypoventilation syndrome, or Cheyne -Stokes respiration. In these diseases, it is in sleep to repeated apneas and reduced respiration and to a fragmentation of sleep. The consequences may be, inter alia, daytime fatigue and impaired performance, but also high blood pressure, heart attack or stroke. For treatment, the patient receives i.d.R. a special ventilator ( sleep therapy device) that is connected by a tube to a respirator mask. Mask and sleep therapy device should use patients with SBAS every night. The sleep therapy leads to a significant improvement in the tendency to fall asleep and daytime alertness.