Sleep underpins everything we do and our ability to recharge. Sleep is pivotal for one's functional capacity in all of the 6 areas addressed by the NDIA. Poor sleep quality is associated with impaired quality of life. Poor sleep quality were more likely to have with anxiety/depression.
Autism
Autistic people can often have trouble sleeping. There are a range of reasons for this including difficulties with relaxing or winding down and irregular melatonin levels.
Autistic adolescents and adults, particularly females, remain vulnerable to sleep problems, with early and middle adulthood being at times of particular risk. Targeted sleep interventions are required.
Immune
In summary, it has become clear that sleep is essential for immune homeostasis and that the deprivation/restriction of sleep leads to altered immune functions.
Sleep exerts an immune-supportive function, promoting host defense against infection and inflammatory insults. Sleep deprivation has been associated with alterations of innate and adaptive immune parameters, leading to a chronic inflammatory state and an increased risk for infectious/inflammatory pathologies, including cardiometabolic, neoplastic, autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases.
Interventions that target sleep might constitute new strategies to constrain inflammation with effects on inflammatory disease risk.
PTSD
Addressing fragmented sleep or sleep architecture could be used to increase emotional memory and learning processes and thus ameliorate responses to trauma exposure, reduce PTSD severity, and improve treatment. Future studies should examine relationships between emotional memory and learning and disturbed sleep in clinical PTSD patients.
Subjective sleep disturbance is highly comorbid with PTSD and is often considered a “hallmark” feature of the disorder.
Depression and Anxiety
Sleep disturbance is the most prominent symptom in depressive patients and was formerly regarded as a main secondary manifestation of depression. However, many longitudinal studies have identified insomnia as an independent risk factor for the development of emerging or recurrent depression among young, middle-aged and older adults.
In particular, our findings pointed to sleep problems as a hub bridging attention control components to hallmark symptoms of MDD and GAD.
Education and the application of policies regarding sleep hygiene may prevent, in some cases, the development of depression and improve the quality of sleep in other cases.
The findings indicate that non-pharmacological sleep interventions are effective in reducing the severity of depression, particularly in clinical populations. This suggests that non-pharmacological sleep interventions could be offered as a treatment for depression, potentially improving access to treatment.
Obesity
It is of paramount importance to investigate sleep disturbances in obese patients and to include the treatment of sleep disturbances in the management of obesity in order to pre- vent or improve metabolic and cardiovascular diseases.
Individuals who regularly slept less than 7 hours per night were more likely to have higher average body mass indexes and develop obesity than those who slept more.
A joint consensus found that short sleep duration is associated with adverse health outcomes, including weight gain and obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, and depression, as well as an increased risk of death.
Diabetes
Short and long sleep duration are associated with a lower insulin sensitivity, suggesting that sleep plays an important role in insulin resistance and may provide the link with development of type 2 diabetes.
Both poor sleep habits and sleep disorders are highly prevalent among adults with type 2 diabetes.
Improvement of sleep in patients with diabetes could therefore aid the treatment of diabetes.
Anorexia
The findings demonstrate that poor sleep quality was associated with more severe symptoms of AN, even when accounting for negative emotions and BMI.
Sleep is equally affected in bulimia and anorexia patients, confirming that sleep and eating disorders are highly correlated. Sleep may be a clinical marker in eating disorders.
In addition to targeting Anorexia Nervosa symptoms, these data suggest that targeting sleep disturbance, anxiety, and worry could improve treatment for AN.
Bipolar
Sleep abnormalities are frequently associated with BD and are often a good predictor of a mood swing. Preservation of stable sleep–wake cycles is therefore a key to the maintenance of stability in BD, indicating the crucial role of circadian rhythms in this syndrome.
Results support the assumption of disturbed sleep as a possibly predisposing factor for BD and suggest sleep improvement as a potential early prevention target.
OCD
Our findings suggest that eveningness and sleep complaints are predictive of affective dysfunctions, and should be carefully considered in the evaluation and treatment of OCD patients.
By addressing sleep disturbance in OCD patients may ensure a holistic approach to treatment, enhance treatment efficacy, mitigate relapse and protect against the onset of co-morbid psychiatric illnesses.
