Incredible facts
Chronic sleep deprivation will cost you much more than spending coffee in the morning. People who suffer from insomnia lack not only sleep, but also gray matter in their brain. For the first time, scientists, when taking an image of the brain, have linked chronic insomnia to less gray matter in the part of the brain that regulates decision-making, and responsible for the vacation. This study can now help patients fight insomnia.
“Based on the results, it can be assumed that people with insomnia are less able to assess the emotional importance of stimuli. And this can affect other cognitive processes, especially the ability to make decisions,” says Ellemarie Altena, one of the study's authors from the Dutch Institute of Neuroscience.
In the study, researchers compared the amount of white and gray matter in 24 older people with insomnia with 13 volunteers with normal sleep patterns, and studied physical and psychiatric disorders that could change the amount of gray matter. Participants in the experiment with sleep disorders experienced volume losses, regardless of how long they had insomnia.
However, researchers cannot say with certainty that insomnia is the cause of the loss of gray matter. It could be the other way around.
“We cannot say what is the cause and what is the effect: either insomnia causes the loss of gray matter, or vice versa. But evidence suggests that low gray matter density in the orbical-frontal brain may be a risk factor for insomnia,” says Altena. “We mostly studied older people. We hope that further studies of people of different ages will help determine what is a cause and what is an effect.”
Sleep researchers have long recognized that insomnia disrupts brain activity, but this experiment is the first attempt to answer the question why these disorders appear, and how to treat them more effectively.
“This article coincides with the findings in the scientific literature that poor sleep has a negative effect on the brain not only at the psychiatric level, but also on a psychiatric level, but also neurological,” says neurologist Ronald Cramer.
Kramer and Altena hope this study will lead to more accurate treatments for insomnia. “It is possible that sleep disorders will be brought under a medical system that examines, diagnoses and treats patients,” Kramer said.