A professor of medicine in Virginia recently wrote an editorial on Medscape.com encouraging other doctors to consider fragmented sleep as a possible explanation for GI discomfort and other complaints.

Sleep is very critical here and essential for you to understand because it is one of those things that is not recognized. Certainly, if you do not recognize something, you do not know how to ask the right questions, address it, and properly direct the patient.

Sleep fragmentation is incredibly prevalent. It is estimated that in the United States, approximately 1 in 3 people sleep less than 7 hours a night.[1] That accounts for somewhere in the range of 50-70 million people in the United States, or about 37% of our adult population.

Get the whole story at www.medscape.com