Couch (A. Vella) on Sleep Deprivation
At Journal Club this week Guarav
presented about sleep deprivation. The paper he discussed covered the positive
effects of sleep deprivation on the clinically depressed.
Here is a copy of the article although for many it will probably
be a little dense and rather confusing. Essentially it is building off the
hypothesis that two negatives make a positive.
While depression is terrible and takes
over your life, leaving you unable to eat right or sleep well or learn normally
and complete sleep deprivation causes hallucination, increased blood pressure,
and even depression. Somehow a mix of the two can lead to very temporary
improvements in depressed patients.
An increased level of dopamine was
found in the depressed who were forced to stay awake for 32 hours, making them
more or less, happy.
This seems to defy common sense and
raises a whole lot of questions. Why are they happier? Can there really be a
path to follow here that could be a real treatment for depression? Do you think
this "treatment strategy" could work for other negatives such as
starvation and depression?
We've all been there, running on just a
few hours of sleep, with a short temper, and even shorter attention span. Could
there really be a treatment hidden here for depression? Do you think there
could be any long term benefits of sleep deprivation?
Feel free to share your opinions with us on sleep
deprivation, or depression, or even better, how you feel they're related.
Honestly, I just don't buy sleep depravation as an effective method for treating depression. You have to weigh the pros and cons here: an increased chance for obesity, difficulty remembering current events, slower brain function, reaction speed and movement. It's not reasonable. I believe that there are definitely more effective ways to spark or activate the dopamine pathway in depressed patients without having to make them go through what we would call hell. The patients showed increased activation of the dopamine pathway when looking at a specific set of pictures. I would like to know how they felt when they weren't looking at the pictures. I would imagine worse than the others. Additionally, sleep depravation can lead to depression if a person is not already depressed. I don't think it's worth the risk.
ReplyDeleteThese depressed patients were shown pictures and this is what spiked their dopamine levels. However, I question what would happen if these patients encountered pictures that triggered a "sad" response. This article explains that sleep deficiency in depressed patients is able to impact their dopamine levels positively, but could lack of sleep also have a negative impact on these patients. If depression is caused by an imbalance of specific molecules, and sleep defiiciency can affect that imbalance in a positive way, why wouldn't it be able to affect it in a negative way? Loss of sleep is already known to cause depression, so could it increase the depression in the already depressed patients. If this is the case then I believe that sleep deficiency should not even be considered for treating depression. Also, it seems like it would be more effort than it is worth. I agree with HH in that there are probably much more efficient and affective methods to increase dopamine levels in depressed patients and while this is an interesting discovery, it isn't worth it.
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