[Andrew K Fletcher]

Doh  thanks Paul don’t know how I did that but its fairly dark in here typing

When our alarm goes off it usually gets a frown or two before we stir into action. I doubt pushing a thermometer into my wife's mouth and she doing it to me amounts to all systems go. We were careful not to move around also, Using the same technique we reproduced the two degree drop in temperature and the alarm went off while we were flat also. So all things being equal we should have obtained fairly accurate results, and the graph does show falls also so we obviously didn't generate too much heat by moving around.

[Bored chemist]

"Doing a google using "common time of death" revealed the AM's have it, which should tell us all something about sleeping flat, "

OK how does dropping dead in the middle of the night (which hardly seems odd to me- the metaphor of "dead to the world" for asleep is common enough. The systems are all nearly shut down as shown by the temperatures , so they only have to slow down a bit more and they stop. The result is death) have anything to do with sleeping flat?


Is there any significant evidence of this I think there could be? For example I gather a lot of old folks prefer to sleep sitting up (something to do with easier breathing I think). Is there a proper controlled investigation into this and mortallity?


Your data show most of the yellow spots and all of the pink ones below the blue ones on either side so, at best, you have reduced the effect. Up til 12 hours just about all the points are above 36.5C.
Between then and 22hrs almost all the points (in particular, all the pink points) are below it no matter if the bed's tilted or not. After 22 hrs they are on the up again.
Also, there are other, less invasive ways of measuring temperature during sleep than waking up and checking it. Even they would not amount to a single blind, never mind double blind trial. It's always easy to underestimate psyhchsomatic effects.

[Andrew K Fletcher]

A nures I met was responsible for quite a few care homes in Torbay. She mentioned that many of the very old people in the care homes refuse to sleep flat at all, as you rightly point out, this happens in a lot of cases as people begin to realise sleeping flat might not be such a good idea. She also mentioned a lot of people that come into the homes and die within a relatively short space of time spend a lot of time sleeping flat.

We did do the mouth temperature measurements while sleeping flat and found a close match to the text book data, much closer than our inclined bed data. The data from the text book mentioned mouth temperatures were taken to plot the graph so we repeated it using a thermometer.

Anyway, many people that have tried the inclined bed therapy have reported changes in body temperature, no more so than those with spinal cord injuries, who lack the ability to regulate their body temperature, except when sleeping on an incline they regain this ability.

I agree a less invasive method would have proved better but this was over 12 years ago.

I am not aware of a controlled study into mortality and posture while sleeping.

Andrew