Sleep and postoperative recovery: waking up to the evidence.

Major surgery can result in severe sleep deprivation, so that stages 3 and 4 and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep are either severely, or completely suppressed.3 This is exacerbated by the surgical ward environment, where patients' sleep is frequently disturbed by both staff and technology. Further, general anaesthesia delays the onset of nocturnal melatonin secretion resulting in sleep dysfunction early in the postoperative course.4 Recent work has sought to determine the role of sleep in nociceptive pathways and subjective pain experience. [Extracted from the article]