Researchers may have finally discovered how people die peacefully in their sleep. A new study in rats suggests that in elderly people, the brain gradually loses the cells that tell the body to breathe.
When old people die during slumber, physicians have typically blamed cardiac arrest. However, Jack Feldman of the University of California, Los Angeles and his colleagues hypothesize in the September Nature Neuroscience that the heart shutdown is actually the result of a condition known as central sleep apnea.
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