An old but still odd article:

MANILA -- 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, 27, died in his sleep last
Friday.

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.

What happened during sleep was a mystery because the
bangungot victims never woke up, said cardiologist
Erdie Fadreguilan of the state-run Philippine General
Hospital.

"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 a.m., 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."

Copyright © 2001 Reuters Limited.