Search PubMed⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

J A Empson

Publications and source records attributed to J A Empson.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1995

Hormone replacement therapy, sleep quality and psychological wellbeing.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the effect of hormone replacement therapy upon sleep quality and duration in postmenopausal women. DESIGN: Randomised, single-blind, placebo-controlled trial. SETTING: Sleep research laboratory. SUBJECTS: Thirty-three healthy postmenopausal women. INTERVENTIONS: Continuous 0.625 mg conjugated equine oestrogens with 0.15 mg cyclic norgestrel taken for 12 days per 28 day cycle. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Occurrence of vasomotor symptoms, polysomnographic sleep stage measures, Stanford sleepiness questionnaire, Crown-Crisp experiential index and the cognitive failures questionnaire. RESULTS: Hormone replacement therapy results in an improvement in menopausal symptoms but not in parameters of sleep quality. Despite this, certain measures of psychological wellbeing showed significant improvement in the hormone replacement therapy group. CONCLUSION: Hormone replacement therapy results in a measurable improvement in physical and psychological welfare, the latter being independent of improvement in sleep quality.

Adult↗
PubMed1978

Auditory evoked potentials and transcendental meditation.

Auditory evoked potentials to tone stimuli were recorded from 8 practised meditators before, during, and after meditation, and also during light sleep. No consistent changes were noted between baseline and meditating AEPs, or between meditating and sleep AEPs.

Attention↗
PubMed1978

REM sleep and memory consolidation.

One proposal referring to a specific function of REM sleep has been that it is necessary for, or at least conductive to, the progress of memory consolidation. This hypothesis was tested by comparing the effects on story retention of REM deprivation against an S4 deprived control. It was found that recall accuracy following REM deprivation was significantly poorer than following S4 deprivation. Furthermore, the degree of deterioration in recall accuracy during REM recovery sleep was less than during S4 recovery sleep. These findings were interpreted as evidence for active REM facilitation of memory consolidation. However, alternative explanations based upon proactive influences need to be investigated.

Humans↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Slow potentials preceding vocalisation.

Twenty-four subjects equally represented by males and females, and left- and right-handers, had slow potentials recorded prior to vocalisation of the same word 25 times ('Yes'), or a different word every sweep, chosen by the subject 5. Negativity on the scalp preceding generated words came earlier than preceding repetitions. Asymmetry in EEG was dependent on handedness, and occurred frontally in females, centrally in males. It is suggested that task-related differences in slow potentials preceding speech, and asymmetries associated with handedness, provide evidence that these potentials are not irretrievably contaminated by movement and respiratory artefacts.

Dominance, Cerebral↗