Anesthesia and sleep medicine: an opportunity to be mutually informative?

The fields of anesthesiology and sleep medicine have the potential to be mutually informative to both clinicians and researchers about etiologies and risks for respiratory instability during non-wakeful states. For example, it is likely that the end states (sleep and sedation/anesthesia), and the underlying neurobiology of these states, are similar and different in important ways. The following review considers such aspects as state of consciousness definitions, control of breathing during wakefulness versus sleep/sedation, and the methodologies that are currently used to quantify respiratory disturbances during altered states of consciousness.