Posted by linkadge on April 21, 2007, at 10:10:38
In reply to Re: Sleep deprivation-Antidepressant effect?, posted by flmm on April 21, 2007, at 9:40:35
>I guess if your exhausted you can't obsess about >depression and anxiety! Makes no sense to >me............
No its not that simple. Doctors have known for a long time that completely depriving deeply depressed patients of one nights sleep results in rapid (but temprary) euthemiua in 60+% of patients.
There are hundreds of articles on the topic dating back to the 70's, and earlier before antidepressant drugs were introduced.
See:
http://www.psycom.net/depression.central.sleepdep.html
Depressed patients have pathological REM patterns beginning too early. Manic patients have the opposite, prolonged REM onset. Sometimes sleep deprivation has the ability to sort of reset (perhaps temporarily) this pathological pattern.
One problem is that as little as 1 second of REM sleep recorded on an EEG can result in complete relaspe, that is why insomnia is *not* the same thing as sleep deprivation, since even in insomnia, there is often small periods of REM sleep.Also note, that most antidepressant drugs work by reducing REM sleep, the degree of REM suprsession often correlates with clinical effect.
Bipolars often have a manic epsiode from sleep deprivation, and epileptics often have worsened seizure threshold. These are all evidences of increased synaptic excitability.
Sleep deprivation dramatically increases hippocampal levels of serotonin (albeiet temporarily), as well as increasing D2 receptor sensitivity.
So, it is not really a matter of just being so drowsy that you don't think about depression, for a number of people there is a specific and robust antidepressant effect.
Linkadge
poster:linkadge
thread:751660
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070419/msgs/751922.html