NCT01960452

A High Density EEG Comparison of Sleep Patterns in Insomnia

A High Density EEG Comparison of Sleep, Sleep Initiation, and Arousal Patterns in Insomnia Patients and Normal Controls

• Status: Completed
• Phase: —
• Study type: Observational
• Enrollment: 45 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Wisconsin, Madison · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 45 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Insomnia, defined as a subjective report of difficulty initiating sleep, maintaining sleep, and/or non-restorative sleep, leads to significant daytime dysfunction and increased health risks. A commonly held hypothesis is that insomnia is caused by a state of hyperarousal, but the neurobiological mechanisms of hyperarousal in insomnia are poorly understood, in part because of limitations in our ability to image the brain during normal human sleep with sufficient temporal resolution. Furthermore, the efficacy of insomnia treatment is judged by subjective report of the patient and demonstration of changes in sleep latency and/or sleep amount which are generally small in magnitude; there are currently no data to demonstrate that insomnia treatments correct any functional abnormalities in the sleep process that likely contribute to neurobehavioral abnormalities and health risks. The goals of the proposed study are to use high density EEG to define abnormalities in specific aspects of sleep in insomnia patients compared to healthy sleeping control subjects to define biomarkers that will both increase our understanding of the pathophysiology of insomnia as well as provide targets to assess treatments for insomnia.

Detailed description

Recent advances in electroencephalographic recording techniques have produced new ways to probe the process and function of sleep. Through the use of high-density EEG (hdEEG, up to 256 channels), it is possible to approach the spatial resolution of other brain imaging modalities while affording the millisecond temporal resolution of EEG and providing a direct measure of the underlying brain activity, unlike the indirect and/or secondary biophysical signals of brain hemodynamics/metabolism obtained with PET or SPECT that are suboptimal for exploring the short-lived spatio-temporal dynamics of many brain processes. Here we used hdEEG to try to characterize topographic changes in sleep EEG expression in individuals with insomnia compared to normal controls. We further used serial awakenings to determine if individuals with insomnia were more likely to subjectively report being awake when they were sleeping, and study instances where a direct confirmation of sleep was followed by a subjective report of wakefulness to see if they are characterized by changes in EEG oscillations.

Conditions

• Primary Insomnia

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Serial awakenings	The first study night will be a baseline sleep recording. The second night will consist of a series of awakenings (using auditory tones) and subsequent periods of falling back asleep in order to examine the cortical dynamics of hyperarousal or other dysfunction during these two critical sleep processes in insomnia.

Timeline

• Start date: 2013-10-01
• Primary completion: 2017-09-01
• Completion: 2017-09-01
• First posted: 2013-10-10
• Last updated: 2025-01-09
• Results posted: 2025-01-09

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States