If this is not your name, click here.
| | If this is not your name, click here. | | |
| | Contact Us | Order Now | Journals | Bookstore | Register a colleague | | |
| |  Sleep Therapy Can Reverse Cognitive Deficits Associated With Chronic Insomnia WESTCHESTER, Ill -- September 3, 2008 -- A neuroimaging study in the September 1 issue of the journal Sleep is the first to find that cognitive processes related to verbal fluency are compromised in people with insomnia despite the absence of a behavioural deficit. These specific brain function alterations can be reversed, however, through nonpharmacological treatment with sleep therapy. The study included 21 chronic insomnia patients (mean age 61 years) and 12 healthy controls (mean age 60 years) who were matched for age, sex, and education. Participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning during the performance of verbal fluency tasks between 5:00 PM and 8:30 PM. Patients were then randomly assigned to a 6-week-long sleep-therapy group or a wait-list group. Therapy involved a combination of sleep restriction, multifaceted cognitive-behaviour therapy, morning and late afternoon bright-light exposure, and body temperature manipulations. After 6 weeks, fMRI scanning was repeated on both treatment groups during the same verbal fluency tasks. Results of fMRI scanning during verbal fluency tasks show that people with insomnia have less activation than controls in the left medial prefrontal cortex and the left interior frontal gyrus. However, participants with insomnia generated more words than controls on both the category fluency task (46.4 words vs 38.7) and the letter fluency task (40.1 vs 32.7). "It was surprising to see that the patients performed at a higher level than the control group, but showed reduced brain activation in their fMRI results," said principal investigator Ysbrand Der Werf, PhD, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Amsterdam, Netherlands. "The success during the task may reflect a conscious effort to counteract the effect of poor sleep." Results from post-treatment neuroimaging showed that cognitive abnormalities recovered for insomnia patients who received sleep therapy, but not for those assigned to a wait-list group. Participants in the sleep therapy group also generated more words on the verbal fluency tasks after treatment than members of the wait-list group, although the results did not achieve statistical significance. According to the authors, these results should encourage the use of sleep therapy in clinical practice as a low-cost, nonpharmacological intervention for insomnia. SOURCE: American Academy of Sleep
|
