Lack of sleep can cause schizophrenia
Last reviewed: 23.04.2024
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A person who does not receive enough sleep, reacts more sharply to stressful situations, can not concentrate and often remains in a bad mood. In severe cases, lack of proper rest can cause loss of memory or hallucinations.
Scientists from the University of Bristol found that there is a connection between regular lack of sleep and schizophrenia, and it is the above symptoms that are characteristic of schizophrenia.
The results of the work of scientists are published in the journal Neuron.
Previously, there was an opinion that a bad dream is one of the symptoms of schizophrenia, but researchers believe that it is the lack of sleep that can lead to the development of schizophrenia. The concept of "bad sleep implies not only insomnia, but also a number of disorders in the brain processes that accompany the sleep of a person.
To find out the correctness of their theory, experts conducted experiments on mice. They did not allow animals to sleep, which led to the dissynchronization of waves that pass from the front to the back of the brain. The most important discovery was that there was an asynchronous relationship between the hippocampus and the frontal cortex, which means that the processes that accompany the consolidation of memory and decision making have ceased to work in a coordinated manner.
A similar pattern is observed in patients diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Despite the results, according to experts, to say that insomnia and lack of sleep lead to schizophrenia, it is impossible. It will be more correct to say that regular lack of sleep can cause changes in the electrical activity of the brain that are present in this mental disorder. And what will happen as a result of the prolonged influence of insomnia on these processes - whether the person will develop schizophrenia or not - already depends on other factors. Moreover, experts emphasize, the study was conducted not on humans, but on animals, and the mental disorder of rodents and humans is not the same thing.
However, scientists do not lose hope that with the help of their discovery, science will move forward in developing new methods for treating short-term memory deficits and scattered attention, which are very difficult to treat.
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