For those whose nightmares are haunted by horrific memories, the advice from a top Israeli sleep expert is the same as you’d get from movie mafioso Donnie Brasco — Fuhgeddaboutit.
Flying in the face of Freudianism, Professor Peretz Lavie of Haifa’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology says those who have experienced extreme trauma are better off blocking out painful memories than trying to cope with the issue by reliving them repeatedly.
Lavie first made the claim more than a dozen years ago, after a news-making study determined that Holocaust survivors who were more “well-adjusted” recalled far fewer of their dreams than those who were more troubled. As he expounded in a recent New England Journal of Medicine article, Lavie believes those traumatized by the Sept. 11 attacks would similarly do well to put their experiences behind them.
Take, for example, an elderly survivor Lavie worked with in Israel. The Dutch native was haunted by the same nightmare for more than four decades.
“He was given to a Christian family who took him to another village where no one would know he was a Jew. And when he was walking in the village, he suddenly saw an old neighbor who knew he was a Jew,” said Lavie, who was recently in the Bay Area on behalf of the American Society for Technion, the institute’s fund-raising arm.
“Remembering the split-second when he froze and knew he was going to be given away to the Gestapo was imprinted on the chip in his brain. It came every night, in crystal clear colors, the split second when their eyes met. If he could erase it in his memory chip, he probably could be much better off.”
Lavie believes that the “debriefing” of many New York firefighters and police officers — an exhaustive and, hopefully, cathartic reliving of the day’s events — probably did more harm than good. Repeatedly watching traumatic images — such as the collapsing of the World Trade Center — could also “burn onto the chip in the memory system…like the nightly repeating of a dream.”
While the events of Sept. 11 gave Lavie reason to unearth his decade-old work, he has spent much of the last 12 years researching the condition of sleep apnea.
The condition, which primarily afflicts middle-aged, overweight men, causes one to stop breathing and awaken hundreds of times during the night, all while snoring loudly. The constant cycle of awakening and the falling back asleep causes sleep apnea sufferers to be tired during the day and, added Lavie, far more accident prone than the norm.
Lavie, whose research demonstrated a link between hypertension and sleep apnea, said those with the disorder are three times more likely to die by age 50 than the general population.
“When you hear of someone dying suddenly at age 45 from a heart attack or stroke, many times they are sleep apnea patients,” he said.
While diagnosing sleep apnea used to require spending a night hooked to complex machinery in a lab like Lavie’s, the professor has helped develop a small device fitting over the hand that patients can use in their own beds. The “sleep-strip” measures one’s pulse, body movements and the oxygen content of the blood.
Early diagnosis of the often-hereditary disorder is key, stressed Lavie. Sleep apnea often afflicts a patient for a decade before its symptoms become apparent, and is caused by the same oxidation of the blood stream that leads to sclerosis and, therefore, strokes and heart attacks.
While general grogginess was blamed for sleep apnea patients’ decreased libido, Lavie found his subjects often had lower testosterone levels, which he believes is a reaction to decreased oxygen levels in the brain.
The only treatment for those already afflicted with sleep apnea is to wear a cumbersome oxygen mask while sleeping. Others, however, may be able to stave off the condition by taking anti-oxidants.
In many cases, Lavie said, it is necessary to treat a patient by reminding him that “he controls his sleep, not his sleep controlling him.”