Loss of Sleep Raises Risks for Anxiety and PTSD
By Jim Windell
This new study appears in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. Entitled “Partial and Total Sleep Deprivation Interferes with Neural Correlates of Consolidation of Fear Extinction Memory,” the study provides us with new insights into how sleep deprivation affects brain function to disrupt fear extinction.
The researchers, led by Anne Germain, PhD, at the University of Pittsburgh, and Edward Pace-Schott, PhD, at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, studied 150 healthy adults in the sleep laboratory. One third of subjects got normal sleep, one third were sleep restricted, so they slept only the first half of the night, and one third were sleep deprived, so they got no sleep at all. In the morning, all the subjects underwent fear conditioning.
