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"The exact neural circuit of sleep control still needs to be further investigated by other techniques in terms of function and neurophysiology."įollow Christopher Wanjek daily tweets on health and science with a humorous edge. "The mechanism underlying insomnia sleep is quite complicated," Li told Live Science.

The study results hint that the underlying cause of white matter abnormalities may be a loss of myelin, the protective coating around nerve fibers. Guihua Jiang, a researcher at the same hospital - as promising but in the early stages. Li sees her group's work - overseen by Dr. She, too, would like to follow a larger group of patients before and after treatment to see if the white matter tracts improve as the insomnia improves, she said. Li said that one of the limitations of her team's study was that it was too small to determine cause and effect or whether abnormalities in white matter tracts can be reversed. Wintermark said he would be interested in seeing a larger study based on these results, particularly to see whether the white matter tracts improve with treatment for insomnia. "We don't fully understand normal variation in the scanning," he said, adding that the technique is still only used as a research tool, not for diagnostics in the clinic. The MRI-based diffusion tensor imaging technique can be affected by numerous factors, such as the age of the patient and the type of MRI machine, Wintermark told Live Science. Max Wintermark, a professor of radiology at Stanford School of Medicine in Stanford, California, who was not part of the study, said the research was important for understanding the cause of primary insomnia but that "it must be taken with a grain of salt."

The worse the neural connections, the worse the sleep and depression.ĭr. The extent of these abnormalities in the thalamus and connected regions was associated with the duration of the patients' insomnia and their self-rated scores on the depression scale, Li said. Compared to the healthy participants, the insomnia patients had significantly less white matter integrity in several right-brain regions and the thalamus, which houses "important constituents of the body's biological clock," Li said. "If white matter tracts are impaired, communication between brain regions is disrupted."Īnd that is what the researchers may have found among the patients with primary insomnia. 2 Provincial People's Hospital in Guangzhou, China, and the lead author of the study. The researchers' goal was to assess the connectivity of the brain's white matter tracts, which are "bundles of axons, or long fibers of nerve cells, that connect one part of the brain to another," said Shumei Li, a researcher at Guangdong No. Each participant also underwent brain MRI with a specialized technique called diffusion tensor imaging, a sensitive tool that can probe deeper than the basic brain structure revealed by MRI to see how well neurons are connecting. All of the participants completed standardized questionnaires concerning their mental health and sleeping patterns. In the new study, researchers in China examined 23 patients with primary insomnia and 30 healthy volunteers. Doctors sometimes prescribe sedatives, but such drugs can become addictive or lose their effectiveness over time. Treatments include behavioral therapy, such as relaxation techniques. The diagnosis is based largely on ruling out known causes for the insomnia.

This type of insomnia can be caused by a host of factors interfering with sleep, such as drug use, stress, pain, allergies, Parkinson's disease and depression.īut about 3 to 5 percent of adults have primary insomnia, according to a 2002 study by researchers at Stanford University. population reports an occasional inability to sleep well, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.