Archive News
Night owl JJ holds key to successful sleeping
Date Published: 11-Apr-2013
Giving someone back a regular night’s sleep is one of the most satisfying things you can do in medicine, exclaims the man who was key to setting up Galway’s two sleep disorder clinics.
Professor JJ Gilmartin has dedicated most of his professional career to treating sleep disorders, which have become the bane of a growing number of people’s lives.
Sleep apnoea affects 5% of the population; restless leg syndrome is a complaint suffered by up to 10%. One study claims insomnia is suffered by 13% of the populace.
“It’s like St Paul falling off the horse on the road to Damascus. I’ve seen people transformed,” explains the consultant respiratory physician.“There’s a dramatic difference. After a full night’s sleep they’ll go, wow. That’s how it should feel.”
People come to the sleep clinic with two main complaints – loud snoring and excessive daytime sleepiness.
Half of all 50-year-old men snore loudly enough to adversely affect their bed partner, the medic reveals. As you go into a deeper sleep, the muscles in the roof of your mouth or palate, tongue and throat relax. The tissues in your throat can relax enough that they partially block your airway and vibrate. And, the more narrowed your airway, the more force needed to breathe. This causes tissue vibration to increase, which causes snoring to grow louder.
Snoring is affected by the anatomy of the mouth, alcohol consumption, nasal problems and sleep apnoea. Sleep apnoea is caused by throat tissues partially or completely blocking the airway, preventing breathing.
“So these patients literally choke. This might happen as often as 60 times per hour. The sleep pattern is completely disrupted and you wake up feeling wrecked, unrefreshed, like a bear with a sore head. They may have headaches. These people feel horrendous. Their day time function is very, very poor, they’re a risk to others at work or on the road, they’re cranky and often they don’t identify where the problem is coming from.”
Patients can easily assess their risk of having sleep apnoea, by answering four questions phrased around the acronym STOP:
Snoring – does it affect others; Tiredness – is it excessive during the day; Observed apnoea – does your partner report you stop breathing in your sleep; Pressure – is blood pressure high.
If the patient answers yes to at least two of those questions they may have the potentially life threatening condition, which puts them at high risk of heart attack, stroke and diabetes.
All patients are advised that losing weight, becoming fitter and cutting down on alcohol may all help improve their sleeping patterns.
The more serious cases get sent forward to the sleep clinic by a GP where they may undergo an overnight sleep study. This may concentrate on breathing pattern alone or could involve a polysomnogram, which measures brain activity as well.
“You see some interesting things on the sleep study. They are tossing and turning. Sometimes they sit up at the side of the bed and attempt to read a book in their sleep.”
There are a range of possible treatments for snoring or sleep apnoea. These include a gum shield to change the jaw shape, an operation to remove nasal polyps or swellings, laser surgery to remove tissue at the back of the throat.
Professor Gilmartin used to recommend sewing tennis balls into the back of a t-shirt to encourage the wearer to sleep on their side and discourage sleeping on the back, which can contribute to problem snoring. Nowadays a foam vest can be bought for around €120 performs the same function.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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