Sleep and dream patterns of oral, manual, and aural/oral hearing-impaired people

The sleep architecture of five hearing-impaired subjects was evaluated. The mode of communication for these subjects was one oral subject, one manual subject, and three aural/oral subjects. The mean age was twenty-one, with an age range of sixteen to thirty-four years. Twenty-one physiological measurements were obtained on each subject during a full night of sleep at The Sleep Disorders Center of Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center, Knoxville, Tennessee. Each measurement (e.g., EEC and EMG) was scored by two certified polysomnographic technologists. These measurements were used to evaluate the sleep architecture among the three modes of communication. Each subject had a psychological evaluation to determine levels of I.Q., depression, and anxiety. The subjects with the greatest hearing loss had more depression and anxiety than the subjects with less hearing loss. Three of the five subjects had high depression and anxiety scores. All three of the aural/oral subjects had alpha waves intruding into their deep sleep. This meant that they had traces of wakefulness interrupting their sleep. The Sleep Center only had a 3 percent occurrence of alpha intrusion in cases of normal hearing people. With some exceptions, the hearing-impaired subjects had less percent of time in REM (dream) sleep and either a longer or shorter latency to REM sleep than the norms. The manual and two aural/oral subjects who were similar in age, were also similar in some sleep measures. The older subjects (twenty-one years for oral and thirtyfour for aural/oral) were similar for some sleep measures. Age may have been a factor. It was not possible to deter mine the affect of first night effects on the data in this study. It may have contributed to the variability in the data from the norms. There were some differences in the results from the sleep studies in this study, and the results obtained for sleep studies on hearing-impaired people in other investigations that used successive nights of measure to minimize first night effects.