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Women’s Health and Sleep Disorders

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Abstract

This chapter reviews the development of knowledge related to women’s sleep and highlights key milestones associated with reproductive phases during the lifespan. These phases include menstruation, pregnancy, and menopausal transition. Historical perspectives on women’s sleep during these three phases are presented. Selected sleep disorders associated with the menstrual cycle and pregnancy are discussed from a historical perspective. The chapter concludes with a discussion of developments in knowledge about sleep during menopausal transition. Sleep studies of menopausal women who experience vasomotor symptoms of hot flashes and night sweats are described, and how hormone replacement therapy affected sleep is discussed. Early studies of women’s sleep were typically descriptive designs with small samples of healthy women, and excluded women with any unhealthy lifestyle characteristics such as smoking, alcohol, and caffeine intake, or being overweight. Findings were difficult to generalize to the population of women regardless of age or reproductive status. Sleep research today can be less invasive, and larger samples of women can be recruited from the general population to study risk factors for sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea, that were rarely seen in the healthy samples studied in earlier research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. San Francisco Family Health Care Nursing, University of California, 2 Koret Way, Room N411Y, San Francisco, CA 94143-0606, USA

    Kathryn A. Lee

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  1. Kathryn A. Lee
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Correspondence to Kathryn A. Lee .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurology, New Jersey Neuroscience Institute JFK Medical Center, Edison, New Jersey, USA

    Sudhansu Chokroverty

  2. Department of Neurology, Gui de Chauliac Hospital, Montpellier, France

    Michel Billiard

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Lee, K. (2015). Women’s Health and Sleep Disorders. In: Chokroverty, S., Billiard, M. (eds) Sleep Medicine. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2089-1_53

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2089-1_53

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

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  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-2089-1

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