Newly defined sleep profiles are associated with different biopsychosocial features

Five distinct profiles of sleep have been identified. But more than that, they were found to be associated with certain aspects of health, cognition and mood as well as specific brain patterns.The findings could contribute to a deeper understanding of the relationship between sleep and health, as well as better ways to diagnose and track sleep issues in patients.The sleep profiles were described in a study in PloS Biology and took into account sleep quality, sleep disruptions and other features of sleep as well as biopsychosocial data. Plus, the sleep profiles were found to have specific patterns that can be seen in brain images conducted by MRI.Many studies on sleep and health don’t really go much beyond sleep duration, and “the multidimensional nature of sleep is rarely capitalized on in research,” said the study. Generally, single-association studies have investigated the relationship between a single dimension of sleep, such as sleep duration, disruption or quality, to a single outcome such as mental health or risk for cardiovascular disease.But by focusing on just a single aspect of sleep, “these studies fail to capture the multidimensional nature of sleep and the multiple intricate links with biological, psychological and socio-environmental . . . factors. Therefore, it remains unclear which biopsychosocial factors are most robustly associated with sleep traits and whether these factors are supported by similar neural mechanisms,” the authors wrote.Read: Health Canada authorizes long-awaited drug to slow early-stage Alzheimer’s diseaseTo better define sleep and its associations with various aspect of health, the researchers conducted a study using data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), a project under the U.S. National Institutes of health (NIH). Over a five-year period, the project amassed data on 1,200 study participants on various aspects of the human brain and health. It included a large dataset containing details about sleep characteristics from the study participants, as well as brain imaging data and biopsychosocial data.The researchers used data for 770 healthy adults where there were complete data. The study participants were adults aged between 22 and 36 years old with an average age of about 28 years, 78% were white and 53.76% were female.In addition, the HCP dataset included 118 biopsychosocial measures for each of the participants.The researchers were able to extract details about each person’s sleep characteristics (also called “sleep dimensions’”), brain imaging data and biopsychosocial data. Using analytical techniques, they were able to determine relationships between each of those areas.The sleep dimensions measured included sleep satisfaction, daytime functioning, sleep medications, sleep latency, sleep duration, sleep efficiency and sleep disturbances.A total of five sleep-biopsychosocial profiles were identified. Those were: poor sleep and psychopathology; sleep resilience and psychopathology; hypnotics and sociability; sleep duration and cognition; and sleep disturbances, cognition and psychopathology.“Each profile can be viewed through a positive or negative light,” said study coauthor Valeria Kebets, PhD, who was a post-doctoral researcher in neuroscience at the National University of Singapore and McGill University while conducting this research.For example, the first profile, poor sleep and psychopathology, “can be either interpreted as linking generally worse sleep to worse mental health, but could also be looked at as better sleep related to better mental health,” she told the Canadian Healthcare Network (CHN). “Poor sleep” refers to not getting enough sleep and having poor quality sleep.Generally, though, mental health is strongly associated with worse sleep, whether it’s general sleep or sleep disturbances specifically, she added. The second profile focused on “sleep resilience” which refers to people whose sleep seemed to be unaffected despite them having mental health symptoms. This profile could also be linked to sleep misperception, whereby someone might not acknowledge that they are experiencing sleep issues. In brief, the five sleep profiles described are:1. Poor sleep and psychopathology. This category described people who have generally poor sleep—including poor sleep quality, poor sleep overall and related poorer daytime functioning. These features were related to worse psychopathology, including depression, anxiety and stress. But better sleep was related to better mental health such as less depression, anxiety or stress.2. Sleep resilience and psychopathology. “Sleep resilience” refers to people who did not report any sleep issues, but experienced mental health symptoms.3. Hypnotics and sociability. People in this category used hypnotics or other sleep aids. This was found to have an association with positive social relationships, lower body mass index (BMI) but also poor visual episodic memory performance.“The use of sleep aids seems to have mostly positive impacts, such as better social relationships, so acting to improve your sleep generally has a positive impact. The specific intervention that will help will depend on the individual,” Kebets said.4. Sleep duration and cognition. This category showed that not getting enough sleep (sleep duration) was associated with poorer cognitive performance. “This finding was in line with previous research showing negative consequences of sleep deprivation on cognition,” Kebets said.5. Sleep disturbances cognition and psychopathology. This category included people who tended to have fragmented sleep due to multiple awakenings for instance. The greater the sleep disturbances, the higher measures of psychopathology and lower cognitive performance.MRI images used in the study revealed “that all the sleep profiles were related to distinct brain connectivity patterns,” Kebets said. She noted that “a lot of these patterns have previously been linked with mental health.”Generally, it’s a good idea to address sleep problems.This study has limitations, according to Toronto sleep researcher Daniel Felsky, PhD.“I am not overly enthusiastic about the findings,” he told CHN. Felsky is an associate professor in the departments of psychiatry and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. He was not involved in the study and provided an outside perspective.The study was a reminder of the limits of self-report data and correlations. “Nearly 90% of the shared variance between sleep and biopsychosocial measures came from a single broad factor, essentially, ‘poor sleep goes with poor mood’,” he said.It also didn’t provide any insight into which problem causes which. He pointed out that the relationship between sleep and mental health is known to be bidirectional.A plus-side of the paper is that it“provides a clear demonstration that the relationship between sleep and well-being is not uniform. Different sleep complaints (such as fragmentation or short duration), map onto different behavioural and neural patterns, undermining the notion of a single ‘good vs. bad sleep’ continuum,” he said.He also said that the category of individuals who reported daytime fatigue despite getting adequate sleep was of interest. This is “something many physicians hear about but can’t easily explain. This could point to subtle neurobiological differences in how people experience rest.”Overall, the study was informative but not revelatory, but“moves us toward a more personalized understanding of sleep complaints,” especially if future studies validate the sleep-brain patterns, he said.

Newly defined sleep profiles are associated with different biopsychosocial features

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