- MANILA (Reuters) - The death
of a young actor in the Philippines last week has put the spotlight on
a mystery ailment which kills healthy Asian men in their sleep.
-
- Filipinos call it "bangungot" or the nightmare
syndrome. Victims are heard moaning just before they die, which is usually
in the middle of the night, doctors say.
-
- Romantic hero Ricardo Yan died in his sleep last Friday
at just 27 years of age. Doctors said on Tuesday he died of hemorrhagic
pancreatitis leading to cardiac arrest. But there was no word on why the
ailment should strike an apparently healthy young man.
-
- Yan was on holiday at a beach resort with a group of
friends. Autopsy results showed he had drunk only a moderate amount of
alcohol, equivalent to about two bottles of beer, prior to his death. There
was no evidence he had taken any drugs.
-
- Filipino doctors -- who call bangungot the Sudden
Unexplained
Nocturnal Death syndrome -- said it generally strikes men between 30 to
40 years of age, although the youngest known victim was only 17. Women
are usually not affected.
-
- "We have not autopsied any woman who died of
bangungot,"
said Dr. Edgardo Gueco, chief of the national police medico-legal division.
"Based on our observations, the victims had eaten heavily or drunk
heavily before going to sleep," he said in a television
interview.
-
- AN ASIAN AFFLICTION?
-
- What happened during sleep was a mystery because the
bangungot victims never woke up, cardiologist Erdie Fadreguilan of the
state-run Philippine General Hospital told Reuters.
-
- "The findings were that something went wrong with
the rhythm of the heart while they were sleeping," Fadreguilan said,
citing results of autopsies of 328 bangungot cases in the Philippines from
1957 to 1987.
-
- In their last moments, the victims were usually heard
moaning or groaning in their sleep, as if suffering from "some form
of agony," he said. "We had no way of knowing what happened
because
they did not survive."
-
- Stranger still, bangungot usually claims its victims
at about 3 o'clock in the morning, doctors said.
-
- Fadreguilan said studies show bangungot cases occurred
mainly in Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines, Vietnam and Laos,
but a similar illness had been reported among Japanese men.
-
- In the United States, only Vietnamese refugees have
suffered
from the condition, he said, but spurned a theory it could have a cultural
or hereditary explanation.
-
- "Even if you move to different places, like the
refugees going to the United States, the men can still suffer from
it,"
Fadreguilan said. "Whether they move outside of their home country
does not decrease the risk of them suffering from it."
-
- Local doctors believe a possible cause of the condition
could be the high carbohydrate diet of Asians, who eat rice as their
staple.
But no one has been able to pinpoint why rice should have any such effect
on a select few or why millions are unaffected.
-
- In Manila, thousands of unbelieving fans flocked to Yan's
wake.
-
- "This can't happen to him, this can't happen to
me, this can't happen especially to him," Yan's long-time girlfriend
actress Claudine Barretto told a television station. "I couldn't
believe
it."
-
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