Hidden Problems In CF

So I have always been a nocturnal creature. I am much more productive during the night then in the morning. I perform better at night with drawing or thinking, so much so that I did all my prep work for Leaving Cert Art and stayed up as long as possible to do my exam. I ended up getting an A. 

At the moment it's 5:10am and I haven't yet gone to sleep. I just haven't been able to sleep for some reason. I thought it was just me that had insomnia, until it was brought up on Facebook with another PWCF. 

I did a little investigation on the subject as I felt its more common then I first imagined. 

I had a few thoughts myself as to why we don't sleep. These are personal reasons;

1) if I don't do much during the day, I have too much energy at night.

2) my Nan was a nighttime person, so I thought it might be passed down.

3) habit 

Now here is the actual reasons as to why PWCF have problem sleeping.

"The authors concluded that adult cystic fibrosis patients with severe lung disease have impaired neurocognitive function and daytime sleepiness, which is partly related to chronic sleep loss and nocturnal hypoxaemia". Concluding the last quote, if PWCF have FEV1 <64% suffer more with insomnia."

Furthermore, another study detecting insomnia/sleep apnea in children with CF says the following;

"Lung involvement in the patients was mild, with forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV₁) values of 72% to 98%.

However, one in four already had chronic Pseudomonas aeruginosa pulmonary infections, 36% had chronic rhinosinusitis, and 26% had adenotonsillar hypertrophy, with about half having some degree of upper airway obstruction.

A number of aspects of sleep architecture were abnormal in the CF children.

For instance, total sleep time was lower, at 7 hours versus 7.4 hours, and sleep efficiency was less, at 80.4% compared with 87.8%. (Comparison was with people without CF)

The CF children also had less rapid-eye-movement sleep (11.7% versus 13.1%5) and more arousals per hour (11 versus 8.2)

Daytime oxyhemoglobin saturation in both patients and controls was 98%, but this fell to 94.7% in the CF group compared with 97% in controls."

Interesting reading nonetheless.

Adios