Sleep disorders

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A good rest is vital to human well-being and physiological events that occur during sleep, should be aimed at achieving a restorative effect on mind and body. Under normal circumstances, this recovery is a fact, and most theories are aimed to argue that this is its ultimate end. But in patients with alterations, changes and processes, that the body undergoes during sleep, lead to various diseases or aggravating existing ones. Sleep disorders are very common clinical entities in the population, that may appear as isolated diseases or symptoms associated with other diseases.

There are currently more than eighty sleep disorders described in the final official classification, to which must be added the symptomatology associated with, since the vast majority of disease, enrolled in a clinical symptom of sleep disturbance. Thanks to advances in the last fifty years in diagnostic techniques, treatment and research on its pathogenesis, sleep medicine has a prominent place in modern medicine. Since sleep medecine bursts in the clinical picture, many official classifications have been proposed for sleep disorders. These disorders represent a group of diverse and heterogeneous diseases difficult to unite.

Sleep disturbance at night is, in turn, a reiterated symptom present in many deseases. This repetition and the late symptomatic description of many of these diseases has made it difficult for researchers to find a valid and universal order. The first classification of sleep disorders was based on stem developments from the main symptom. This first approach evolved towards greater importance of the disease at the expense of the symptom as a classificatory basis. The latest ratings recover the initial power once again based on the symptoms. The first classification was developed in 1979 by the Association of Sleep Disorders Centers (ASDC, Association of Sleep Disorders Centers).

It was published under the title "Diagnostic Classification of Sleep Disorders and awakening." It identified sixty-eight disorders established in accordance with the main symptoms, that were enrolled. The investigation of the alterations of sleep-wake cycle since then have produced extensive material about types, epidemiology and characteristics. Driven by new developments, in 1990 a new classification was published, the International Classification of American Sleep Disorders Association of Sleep Disorders (ASDA, American Sleep Disorders Association) (International Classification of Sleep Disorders or ICSD) in consensus with the entire medical community. In 1994, the American Psychiatric Association published the fourth edition of the Diagnostic Manual of mental disorders (DSM-IV) and the World Health Organization (WHO) sets up two years earlier, in 1992 the International Classification Diseases (ICD 10).

The most recent classification is that developed by the American Association of Sleep Disorders (International Classification of Sleep Disorders) in 2005 as an update to that published in 1990. Under the acronym of ICSD-2 will be referred from now to the second edition of International Classification of Sleep Disorders, as the most comprehensive and updated in terms of specific disorders of sleep. Given structure of this nosology raised seven groups: insomnia, respiratory disorders, hypersomnia, circadian rhythm disorders, abnormal movements, isolated symptoms, normal variants and parasomnias that group of eighty different defined entities. There is a classical symptomology common to many of these disorders and frecuently symptoms, such as excessive sleepiness, which appear repeatedly in the clinical picture of many of them.