Chronic insomnia and temporary sleep deprivation left different “traces” in the brain

Chronic insomnia affects about 20-35% of people, and in old age, such disorders occur in almost every second person. Short-term sleep deprivation due to work schedule, stress, too long use of gadgets or other reasons, probably, everyone has faced. An international team of scientists with the help of meta-analysis summarized the data of past works on how sleep disorders affect the human brain, and showed that constant and episodic failures of this kind leave different “traces”.

Anyone who has ever had poor or little sleep knows that it can be followed by increased irritability, decreased productivity due to scattered attention and slower reaction times.

However, regular lack of sleep has far more serious consequences. Studies have shown that such disorders negatively affect the development of the brain, reduce the excretion of harmful substances from it, reduce emotional stability, impair working memory, productivity in studies and at work. Chronic insomnia is a known risk factor for the development of mental illness.

To compare the negative effects of long-term and short-term sleep disorders, a group of neurologists and other medical specialists reviewed the available literature on the subject. The scientists reviewed more than 200 studies, including 140 unique experiments involving 3,380 people. An article about it was published by the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

In scientific papers included in the review, compared imaging data of people with chronic sleep disorders (eg, insomnia, apnea, narcolepsy) and healthy patients, or subjects who were given a full night's sleep or short-term sleep deprivation.

There were clear differences between the groups. People with chronic insomnia showed changes in the anterior cingulate cortex, an area associated with decision-making and emotions, as well as in the right amygdala (responsible for memory and processing of negative experiences) and hippocampus (involved in the mechanisms of emotion formation and memory consolidation). These abnormalities may explain the daytime symptoms that occur with such sleep disorders: fatigue, memory problems, mood swings, and depression.

In contrast, episodic sleep deprivation correlated with changes in the right thalamus, an area responsible for regulating body temperature, movement, and pain perception. This is consistent with symptoms commonly complained of with sleep deprivation: chilliness, slower reactions, and difficulty focusing.

In this way, the researchers demonstrated that although chronic and short-term sleep disorders share common neurobiological mechanisms, they affect different brain regions. This knowledge may help in the development of more precise treatments. Also, understanding these trends is important for the prevention of depression, anxiety and dementia, the likelihood of which increases with regular insomnia.

Earlier, psychologists from the UK concluded that people with disturbed sleep are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, especially after exposure to relevant content.