Undine Syndrome: Causes, Description, Treatment

Syndrome Undiny - so beautifully called the doctors are periodic breathing stops, which can be observed in both infants and adults. It would seem that there is such a thing? However, such failures of oxygen supply to the body can lead not only to the development of various diseases of organs and systems, but also to a lethal outcome.

Why is it called?

Its name, Syndrome Undiny received thanks to one of the old legends. According to her, the owner of the castle Ringstatten - Knight Guldbrandt - lost his way in the cursed forest. The old fisherman saved his faithful death by giving shelter in his house. It was there that the noble knight fell in love with the immortal mermaid Undina - the adopted daughter of an old man. Undine also liked Guldbrandt, and she agreed to become his wife and give birth to a child from him. The immortal mermaid after the birth of his son turned into an ordinary mortal woman. Many years passed, years obliterated Undina's former beauty and took away the love of her husband. Once I saw Undine, her husband in the arms of a young man - Bertaldi. What happened next, the legend does not specify - whether Undin drowned in the Danube itself or in this her husband helped her, dropping from a steep cliff. But Guldbrandt, who soon decided to marry the young Bertald, awaited a terrible life: when he appeared to him, the ghost of Undina cursed the treacherous traitor, forcing him to remember, even at night, how to breathe. For him, the dream became fatal, because, falling asleep, he could not control his breathing and died.

Today, Undine's syndrome is the unofficial name for stopping respiratory activity in a dream.

What's going on?

The official scientific name for this disease is "sleep apnea syndrome". It is expressed in violation of the functions of the respiratory center and stopping, during sleep, breathing. Manifest this disease can, both in infancy, and in any period of a person's life. Brilliantly described how the first time a person manifests the syndrome of the curse of Undine, Vishnevsky - a popular Polish writer (a collection of short stories "Mistress").

When a patient falls asleep, then for some reason his body does not perform an automatic function to regulate breathing, because of which a person can not breathe on his own, and as a result, choking occurs, or as doctors call it - dysrhythmic hypoventilation. At such times, the level of oxygen entering the body is significantly reduced, which is why the functions of most organs and systems, including the brain, are suppressed.

Who is affected by the disease?

Unlike other diseases that affect more or less certain age or gender groups, people of almost any age can manifest Undine's curse syndrome. In adults, it is really rare, but mostly observed in infants and children. This is explained by the fact that earlier, most of the sick simply did not live to mature, dying from stopping breathing at an early age. Other types of the syndrome of nocturnal apnea are more common in adult men, usually over the 40th line, and in rare cases in women.

What happens to the body?

How does the syndrome of Undine's curse affect the human body-the nocturnal sleep apnea syndrome? First of all, with a decrease in the level of oxygen in the blood, the cardiovascular system suffers. The cardiac muscle begins to contract rapidly, the blood vessels contract sharply, thus raising blood pressure. In youth, when a person is still full of strength and the body is not stricken with various ailments, all this passes unnoticed. In the older age, when the body is already quite "worn out," such nightly stress can easily provoke a stroke or a heart attack and even lead to death.

Types of stopping breathing in sleep

Undine's syndrome is not the only disturbance of respiratory function in sleep. Physicians distinguish and other types of apnea:

• Peripheral (obstructive);
• Central;
• Mixed.

Peripheral apnea is characterized by frequent, more than 15 cases per hour, respiratory arrest, the duration of which exceeds 10 seconds. With this kind of apnea, the flow of air stops in the upper respiratory tract, because of which the inhaled air does not enter the lungs. As a rule, such a violation of breathing occurs due to the violation of the passage of nerve impulses to the pharyngeal and respiratory muscles.

Central apnea arises from the fact that the respiratory tract does not receive the necessary activating impulse from the central nervous system (CNS). A similar condition develops, usually as a result of severe pathological changes in the structure of the brain caused by trauma or disease.

Signs of both peripheral and central apnea are observed in the so-called mixed type, which is quite often diagnosed in newborns and infants.

Symptoms

As a result of such a violation, as apnea (whether peripheral, central or mixed type), frequent both conscious and unconscious awakenings, the character of the functioning of the heart and vessels changes. All this leads to the development of the following symptoms:

• Day time:

- high fatigue;

- a constant feeling of fatigue and lack of energy;

- Morning headaches;

- decreased ability to concentrate and remember;

- emotional instability.

• Nightly:

- problems with falling asleep and insomnia;

- frequent awakenings;

Sweating;

- Frequent urination.

In addition to these symptoms, as other organs and systems get damaged, new signs of disturbances in the body's activity will appear.

Root Causes

Until the second half of the last century, scientists could not understand what causes the syndrome of the curse of Undine, the reasons for its emergence were incomprehensible and mysterious. No one could answer the question of why perfectly healthy babies and young men, adult women and men suddenly died in a dream from stopping breathing. Only in the early 60-ies of the XX century, researchers R. Mitchell and J. Svingingaus managed to establish that this disease is a form of sleep apnea. This discovery scientists helped to make a patient who lost automatic control of breathing as a result of severe brain damage. Just like patients with Undine's syndrome, it cost the patient to fall asleep, how to control the respiratory function, he could not and as a result began to suffocate. However, these studies could not answer the question of what causes similar violations in ordinary people.

Only in the 21st century French researchers managed to establish the cause of this disease. As a result of a series of experiments, scientists found that the gene Thox2B is responsible for stopping respiration in animals. Further selective studies of people with Undine's syndrome confirmed the presence of the same gene in them. The second important discovery was that the gene mutation is not inherited, but occurs during the development of the embryo.

The Syndrome of Undine's Curse: Treatment

For a long time, in addition to connecting sick people at night to the breathing apparatus, there were no ways to resist this disease. In the last few years, in a number of European countries, such as Sweden, Germany and some others, special devices have been implanted in the brain, or rather into the diaphragmatic nerve, with the syndrome of Undina, which "include" breathing when it stops. According to observations of operated patients, they are no longer experiencing any breathing problems at night or during the day.