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"One person yawning sets off everyone else"

Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, Lille University Hospital, Lille, France

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr Marie-Pierre Perriol
mperriol@yahoo.fr

Keywords: yawning

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Yawning is a stereotyped behaviour present in most mammals from rodents to humans and has been described since antiquity. Hippocrates considered yawning to be an exhaustion of the fumes preceding fever. Modern medicine did not pay much attention to it until the 1980s, when, with advances in neuropharmacology, yawning proved to be a valuable tool for the assessing dopaminergic activity and the pharmacological properties of new drugs. However, its precise role in human physiology is still unknown and its mechanisms remain unclear. The paper by Cattaneo et al (see page 98–100) reports two cases of pathological yawning as the earliest symptom of brain stem infarction which introduces new arguments for locating this neuronal network in the lower brain stem.

Yawning occurs after waking up, before eating, before sleeping, and in passive activities when it is necessary to maintain a certain level of vigilance.¹ It is then followed . . . [Full text of this article]

Relevant Article

Pathological yawning as a presenting symptom of brain stem ischaemia in two patients

L Cattaneo, L Cucurachi, E Chierici, and G Pavesi
J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatry 2006 77: 98-100. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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