Christian Guilleminault, a pioneer of modern sleep medicine, died on July 9 at the age of 80 from complications due to metastatic prostate cancer.
Popular as “CG” among his colleagues at the Stanford University School of Medicine, Guilleminault was involved in the first identification and classification of sleep disorders, according to the World Sleep Society. For instance, in 1993, he coined and described “upper airway resistance syndrome”—a type of disordered breathing during sleep that doesn’t cause reduced oxygenation as seen in obstructive sleep apnea but leads to sleep microfragmentation.
“The description of the ‘upper airway resistance syndrome’ may be his greatest contribution to sleep medicine—it changed the way breathing abnormalities in sleep were conceptualized,” says Robert Thomas, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the Sleep Medicine Fellowship director at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Before, doctors only noted breathing problems in sleep if they included hypoxic events.
Guilleminault ...
