Scientists have just defined five sleep profiles — and some could help spot mental illness
Scientists have identified five distinct “sleep profiles.”
And based on their analysis, the researchers concluded that a good night’s sleep is about more than just sleep duration or how intermittent it is. Genetics and emotional states such as feeling depressed, anxious, stressed or sad contribute to sleep quality, and each sleep profile was linked to how people functioned in various ways, researchers reported in a study published October 7 in the journal. Biology PLOS.
Scientists know that people who sleep poorly are at much higher risk of developing depression, anxiety, cardiovascular disease and cognitive impairment, and tend to have a shorter life expectancy, the authors write.
But the reason and direction of the correlation between these links is unclear, and most previous studies didn’t really classify sleep at a finer level.
To address this problem, researchers used data from the Human Connectome Project, which maps connections at nerve fiber levels throughout the human brain, to try to get a more detailed picture of sleep quality and its relationship to well-being.
The dataset contains brain images and a wide range of self-reported details about each person’s lifestyle, mental and physical health, and personality and sleep characteristics – for example, typical sleep duration, difficulty staying asleep, and use of sleep aids.
People diagnosed with clinical depression were excluded from the study, but if people in the data set had subclinical symptoms of anxiety or depression that did not interfere with their daily functioning, they were included. The researchers focused on data from 770 people aged 22 to 36 whose sleep was unlikely to have been affected by the aging process, Perrault said.
Use unsupervised machine learning, which employs artificial intelligence To analyze data without predefined categories, researchers found statistical links between certain lifestyle characteristics, brain imaging, and sleep characteristics.
Participants were asked to rate their sleep over the past month using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. A score of 5 or lower is considered a good sleeper, and the average score among those studied was 5.14 on a scale of 0 to 19, the journal notes.
Although there were good sleepers, the researchers focused on those with scores above 5. This produced five sleep profiles. For example, “poor sleepers” are people who have trouble sleeping and have mental health symptoms, such as feelings of anxiety, and “disturbed sleepers” are people whose sleep is disrupted to the point that it affects their health and cognitive functioning.
Each profile is also linked to a “neural signature,” or a brain response that contains information about what the person may have been experiencing at the time, such as body temperature, nightmares or hormonal fluctuations.
This suggests that sleep patterns are associated with both brain wiring and markers of health and well-being, Perrault said.
Dr Henry Yaggiprofessor of internal medicine and director of the Yale Centers for Sleep Medicine, praised the study’s methodology. “This is a much more comprehensive sleep assessment than we’ve had in the past,” said Yaggi, who was not involved in the research. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” he told Live Science. “There are sleep patterns linked to mental health.”
Perrault thinks the five sleep profiles could potentially be used as biomarkers or measurable warning signs of conditions that might arise later. Since the profiles were defined in healthy young adults, more research is needed to see if they could work as biomarkers, perhaps to detect developing anxiety and depression, Yaggi said.
Perrault and Yaggi told Live Science that they see potential in using the five sleep profiles to guide clinical interventions. For example, perhaps certain treatments such as talk therapy, sleep apps, and continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines aimed at improving sleep are more helpful to “short sleepers” than “sleep aid users.” Overall, this line of research could also shed light on why approximately 40% of patients do not respond to cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), a type of talk and behavior therapy, Perrault added.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to offer medical advice.
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