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Previous Volume 347:445-446 August 8, 2002 Number 6 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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To the Editor: Garrigue et al. (Feb. 7 issue)¹ showed that atrial pacing resulted in a significant improvement in the frequency of apnea in patients being treated for bradyarrhythmia. We believe that this finding speaks both to the importance of ventilatory loop gain in the pathogenesis of sleep apnea and to the effect of cardiac output on loop gain. Loop gain, an engineering term, describes the instability inherent in negative-feedback control systems.² Mathematically, it is the ratio of a response (e.g., hyperpnea) to a stimulus (e.g., apnea). If the response is greater than the stimulus (loop gain, >1), the system . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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