Washington, Jan 28 (Inditop.com) Beware – chronic insomnia could shrink your grey matter, which plays a key role in memory, attention, thought, language and consciousness.
Chronic and severely stressful situations, those connected with depression and post- traumatic stress disorder, have also been associated with smaller volumes in such “stress sensitive” brain regions.
Using a specialised technique called voxel-based morphometry, Ellemarije Altena and Ysbrand van der Werf, from the research group of Eus van Someren of the Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience, evaluated the brain volumes of people with chronic insomnia.
“We show, for the first time, that insomnia patients have lower grey matter density in brain regions involved in the evaluation of the pleasantness of stimuli, as well as in regions related to the brain’s ‘resting state’.”
“The more severe the sleeping problems of insomniacs, the less grey matter density they have in the region involved in pleasantness evaluation, which may also be important for the recognition of optimal comfort to fall asleep,” Altena said, according to a release of Eus van Someren.
“Our group previously showed that insomniacs have difficulties with recognising optimal comfort. These findings urge further investigation into the definition of subtypes of insomnia, for which we have now initiated the Netherlands Sleep Registry,” she said.
John Krystal, editor of Biological Psychiatry, which published these findings, observed that “insomnia is a common feature of nearly every psychiatric condition… a common symptom of psychiatric disorders or high levels of life stress, generally.”
