Ricerc@Sapienza

This retrospective study aims at helping physicians select babies considered at risk for fatal events during sleep. It does so by describing the clinical features and outcome of worrying infants’ behaviour during sleep, with the activation of an emergency medical service and/or emergency department, subsequently referred to the Centre for Paediatric Sleep Medicine and sudden infant death syndrome, Regina Margherita Children’s Hospital, Turin, Italy.

COVID-19 has critically impacted the world. Recent works have found substantial changes in sleep and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dreams could give us crucial information about people's well-being, so here we have directly investigated the consequences of lockdown on the oneiric activity in a large Italian sample: 5,988 adults completed a web-survey during lockdown.

Purpose: In adolescence, physiological (circadian and homeostatic regulation of sleep) and social habits contribute to delayed sleep onset, while social obligations impose early sleep offset. The effects of delayed school start time on the subjective/objective measures of sleep– wake patterns and academic achievement have not been established.

Dream research has advanced significantly over the last twenty years, thanks to the new
applications of neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques. Many findings pointed out that
mental activity during sleep and wakefulness shared similar neural bases. On the other side, recent
studies have highlighted that dream experience is promoted by significant brain activation,
characterized by reduced low frequencies and increased rapid frequencies. Additionally, several

The preclinical stage of AD is characterized by β-amyloid (Aβ) aggregation into amyloid plaques and tau phosphorylation and aggregation into neurofibrillary tangles. There is a consensus on the importance of sleep within this context: the bidirectional relationship between sleep and AD pathology is supported by growing evidence that proved that the occurrence of sleep changes starting from the preclinical stage of AD, many years before the onset of cognitive decline.

Sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) has a trait-like nature. Several findings highlighted the heritability of spectral power in specific frequency ranges and sleep spindles during NREM sleep. However, a genetic influence on the K-complex (KC), one of the electrophysiological hallmarks of NREM sleep, has never been assessed. Here, we investigated the heritability of the KC detected during NREM stage 2 comparing 10 monozygotic (MZ) and 10 dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs.

Objective Narcolepsy type 1 widely affects the architecture of sleep with frequent fast transition to REM sleep at both nighttime and daytime sleep onset. The occurrence of repeated sleep onset REM periods over the Multiple Sleep Latency Test offers a unique opportunity to identify EEG patterns predictive of successful dream recall after short periods composed of only REM or NREM sleep. It also permits to disentangle state- from trait-like differences in dream recall, by using a within-subjects design.

Sleep onset is characterized by specific and orchestrated patterns of frequency and topographical EEG changes. Power analyses and computational assessments of network dynamics have described an earlier synchronization of the centrofrontal areas rhythms and a spread of synchronizing signals from associative prefrontal to poste- rior areas. We assess how ‘‘small world” characteristics of brain net- works, as reflected in EEG rhythms, are modified in the wakefulness- sleep transition comparing pre- and post-sleep onset epochs.

SUMMARY: Sleep talking is one of the most common altered nocturnal behaviours in the whole population. It does not represent a pathological condition and consists in the unaware production of vocalisations during sleep. Although in the last few decades we have experienced a remarkable increase in knowledge about cognitive processes and behavioural manifestations during sleep, the literature regarding sleep talking remains dated and fragmentary.

Abstract In this chapter, we have reviewed an extensive literature supporting the 4 critical role of sleep for several aspects of emotional processing and regulation. In the first part, we discussed the main behavioral and psychophysiological studies that examined how sleep influences the processes of encoding and consolidation of emotional memory. In addition, we examined how sleep modulates emotion regulation, emotional reactivity, and empathy. Further, we discussed the implication of sleep in fear conditioning memory, threat generalization, and extinction memory.