Sixty years before he would be referred to as the "Father of Sleep Medicine," William Dement, MD, PhD, got kicked out of a class for dozing off. One of the world's foremost sleep experts, Dement is profiled in the current issue of STANFORD magazine, with writer Nicholas Weiler describing how Dement blazed a trail for the field of sleep research and medicine.
From the piece:
When he arrived at Stanford, he set aside most of his research on dreams and shifted his focus to pathologies that affect sleep quality—and to the importance of optimal sleep in our daily lives. "It wasn't until we realized there were sleep disorders," he says, that people started paying attention to sleep research. In 1970, he founded the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic, a center dedicated to the diagnosis and treatment of these maladies. The clinic was soon inundated by patients complaining of extreme daytime sleepiness due not to narcolepsy or insomnia, but to a recently discovered disorder, sleep apnea, in which the patient's airway would collapse during sleep, causing him to wake gasping for air hundreds of times each night.
Galvanized by the unexpected prevalence of undiagnosed sleep disorders, Dement spent the next decade working feverishly to raise the profile of sleep medicine as a clinical field. Before long, similar clinics were springing up all over the country, "and they were finding the same thing," Dement says. Still, it wasn't until 1993 that the first long-term epidemiological study found that 24 percent of men and 9 percent of women suffer from sleep apnea. Research at the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic and elsewhere has found strong correlations between sleep apnea and obesity, high blood pressure and heart disease, America's leading cause of death.
Thanks to his work and the popular sleep class that he has taught since 1971 (more than 20,000 students have taken it!), Dement is well-respected and loved among his peers and students - something captured by this 2008 video.
Previously: Stanford docs discuss all things sleep, Catching some Zzzs at the Stanford Sleep Medicine Center, Thanks, Jerry: Honoring pioneering Stanford sleep research and Catching up on sleep science
Related: Stalking the netherworld of sleep and Dement keeps last class wide awake
Illustration, which originally appeared in STANFORD, by Gabriel Moreno
