United States: Recently, a New light is shed on the neurological differences between different types of insomnia by a recent study published in Biological Psychiatry.
Across four of the five insomnia subtypes, structural brain connectivity – how different parts of the brain are connected – is different, the research found.
More about the finding
These findings may provide the basis for more targeted treatment approaches for people with insomnia and, perhaps, eventually, targeted therapies that can be personalized for a person’s brain anatomy.
Insomnia is common (about 10 percent of adult Europeans) and affects a large proportion of the population.
People with insomnia have trouble falling or staying asleep and waking up too early, and this often impacts their ability to function during the day.
Insomnia and beyond
Beyond the immediate pang of discomfort, insomnia is linked to increased risk of other health conditions, including cardiovascular and heart disease, obesity, and mental health disorders like depression and anxiety.
Insomnia is commonly treated with cognitive behavioral therapy, but this doesn’t necessarily help most people, even in combination with medication.
Scientists believe that a better understanding of the brain mechanisms underlying insomnia would help improve treatment outcomes.
However, previous neuroimaging has shown some clues offering that loss of sleep is related to the disturbance of high-level brain networks like the default mode network and the salience network.
Despite that, findings have thus far been inconsistent. The reason might be that there is considerable variation among individuals with insomnia – a disorder that may not have one cause or cure for all.
In the recent past, researchers identified five different insomnia subtypes, each of which has its own profile of distress levels and personality traits.
However, unlike the sleep patterns alone, those subtypes were identified through a data-driven approach, making the classification more robust. In the current study, we sought to determine whether these subtypes also differ in brain structure.
What more are the experts suggesting?
According to Eus van Someren, the study author and a professor at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, “When we started to think about subtypes years ago, we considered that different combinations of minor deviations (towards the sides of the normal distribution) in brain circuits could have a final common path of a brain vulnerable to insomnia,” psypost.org reported.
“At that time, no big database with MRI data on people with insomnia was available. Therefore, we tried to assess proxy measures for individual differences in brain circuits,” Someren continued.
Moreover, “We selected a large number of life history, mood, and personality trait questionnaires that had been associated with individual differences in brain circuits. We implemented them on our website ‘slaapregister.nl’ for volunteers to fill out. Thousands of people completed the long list of questionnaires. We used data-driven clustering approaches to find specific profiles of scores on the questionnaires within the people that suffered from insomnia.”