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 “The overall message that poor quality and insufficient sleep lead
to poor mood, which, in turn, worsens sleep was not surprising,”
said lead author David A. Kalmbach of the University of Michigan
Medical School in Ann Arbor.
More noteworthy, he added, was that these relationships were evident
in healthy, young women, not just insomniacs or depressed people.
The researchers studied 171 female college students for two weeks,
beginning with an in-person questionnaire assessment of anxiety and
depression levels and continuing with daily self-reported measures
of mood and anxiety. The women also reported their total sleep time,
time to fall asleep, and ratings of sleep quality each night.
On average, the women slept for seven hours and 22 minutes each
night, taking 21 minutes to fall asleep. Overall, they rated their
sleep quality “fairly good.”
At the start of the study, a third of the women scored in the “at
risk” range for depression and 17 percent had clinically significant
anxiety.
Women who averaged less sleep per night over the two-week period
tended to report greater “anhedonic” depression symptoms, or the
inability to enjoy pleasurable things. But they also tended to
report more of these symptoms the day after a night of particularly
long sleep, as reported in Sleep Medicine.
One night of sleep deprivation may improve mood the following day.
But unfortunately, “therapeutic effects of a night of sleep
deprivation are typically short-lasting, and because chronic sleep
deprivation increases depression-risk, the therapeutic benefit of
sleep deprivation on depression is modest at best,” Kalmbach said.
When women felt greater general distress, they took longer to fall
asleep and slept more poorly. Higher levels of depression symptoms
tended to come before a night of longer time to fall asleep, shorter
total sleep time and poorer sleep quality.
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Depending on the cause of the sleep problems, treatment for
depression and anxiety can improve sleep quality, Kalmbach told
Reuters Health by email.
“Unfortunately,” he added, “for depressed and/or anxious individuals
who have successfully gone through psychiatric treatment and no
longer have a diagnosis, what we see is that sleep problems often
linger, because they do not fully resolve.”
Treatments for sleep apnea and insomnia have helped ease depression
symptoms, but treatments for sleep disorders are not a cure for
depression or anxiety, he said.
“Sleep and mood are similarly related in men and older women such
that sleep problems worsen mood and vice versa, and that the
relationship between depression and poor sleep is stronger than the
relationship between anxiety and sleep,” he said.
“People who are concerned with their sleep or believe they may have
a sleep disorder should seek the help of a sleep physician or sleep
psychologist to discuss treatment options,” Kalmbach said. “Early
attention toward sleep problems is likely to lessen risk for
depression or anxiety, which can develop over time when sleep
problems are not addressed.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1sTf2e0 Sleep Medicine, online May 12, 2016.
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