Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Discharge Patterns of Human Tensor Palatini Motor Units During Sleep Onset

2012; Oxford University Press; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5665/sleep.1834

1550-9109

Christian L. Nicholas, Amy S. Jordan, Leila Heckel, Christopher Worsnop, Bei Bei, Julian P. Saboisky, Danny J. Eckert, David P. White, Atul Malhotra, John Trinder,

Sleep and Wakefulness Research

Upper airway muscles such as genioglossus (GG) and tensor palatini (TP) reduce activity at sleep onset. In GG reduced muscle activity is primarily due to inspiratory modulated motor units becoming silent, suggesting reduced respiratory pattern generator (RPG) output. However, unlike GG, TP shows minimal respiratory modulation and presumably has few inspiratory modulated motor units and minimal input from the RPG. Thus, we investigated the mechanism by which TP reduces activity at sleep onset.