I'm also very much not a doctor, but I read a lot of medical texts for fun and I have a naive interpretation to float out there (that hopefully someone in the k

I'm also very much not a doctor, but I read a lot of medical texts for fun and I have a naive interpretation to float out there (that hopefully someone in the know can correct or refute!) The paper talks about "cholinergic deficit" (a situation that is also common in dementia sufferers). The parasympathetic nervous system is heavily reliant on cholinergic agents which is why if you take medication that's anticholinergic (including many antihistamines like promethazine) it tends to dull the senses, send people to sleep, make it harder to wake up, etc. (This is what a lot of those "sleep aids" you find in US airports are doing at a low level.) My layman's attempt at jumping to a conclusion, then, is that death is not caused merely by cholinergic deficit, but that if someone has such a deficit and is harder to self-rouse, asphyxiation during sleep becomes somewhat more likely?