New publications
Lack of sleep can cause schizophrenia
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
All iLive content is medically reviewed or fact checked to ensure as much factual accuracy as possible.
We have strict sourcing guidelines and only link to reputable media sites, academic research institutions and, whenever possible, medically peer reviewed studies. Note that the numbers in parentheses ([1], [2], etc.) are clickable links to these studies.
If you feel that any of our content is inaccurate, out-of-date, or otherwise questionable, please select it and press Ctrl + Enter.
A person who does not get enough sleep reacts more acutely to stressful situations, cannot concentrate, and is often in a bad mood. In severe cases, lack of proper rest can cause memory loss or hallucinations.
Scientists from the University of Bristol have discovered that there is a link between regular sleep deprivation and schizophrenia, and that the above symptoms are characteristic of schizophrenia.
The results of the scientists’ work were published in the journal “Neuron”.
Previously, there was an opinion that poor sleep 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 "poor sleep" implies not only insomnia, but also a number of disturbances in the brain processes that accompany human sleep.
To find out if their theory was correct, the experts conducted experiments on mice. They prevented the animals from sleeping, which led to a desynchronization of the waves that travel from the front to the back of the brain. The most important discovery was that the asynchronous movement was observed between the hippocampus and the frontal cortex, which means that the processes that accompany memory consolidation and decision-making stopped working smoothly.
A similar picture is observed in patients diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Despite the results obtained, according to experts, it is impossible to claim that insomnia and lack of sleep lead to schizophrenia. It would be more correct to say that regular lack of sleep can cause changes in the electrical activity of the brain, which are present in this mental disorder. And what will happen as a result of the long-term influence of insomnia on these processes - whether a person will develop schizophrenia or not - already depends on other factors. Moreover, experts emphasize, the study was conducted not on people, but on animals, and the mental disorder of rodents and humans is not the same.
However, scientists do not lose hope that their discovery will help advance science in developing new treatments for short-term memory deficits and attention deficit disorders, which are very difficult to treat.
[