(Press-News.org) Nightmares affect 30-40% of patients with narcolepsy, but are often overlooked
Treatment can transform patients’ sleep and their daytime mood in a matter of weeks
Study found overall reduction in nightmare severity and frequency in six patients
CHICAGO --- A new Northwestern Medicine study has demonstrated a new way to treat narcolepsy-related nightmares.
The scientists combined cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and lucid dreaming to help patients in a small clinical trial.
“We had them imagine what they’d like to dream instead of their nightmare, almost like they’re writing a movie script,” said corresponding author Jennifer Mundt, assistant professor of neurology (sleep medicine) and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
The study found overall reductions in nightmare severity and frequency in all six patients tested. The findings were published Oct. 23 in the Journal of Sleep Research.
Despite being distressing, nightmares are often ignored
Vivid, disruptive and distressing nightmares affect between 30 to 40% of people with narcolepsy, a chronic neurological disorder that affects the brain's ability to regulate sleep and wakefulness. These nightmares can even cause patients to fear sleep, leading to increased fatigue and depression. Despite their frequency in narcolepsy patients, nightmares have not received enough attention in narcolepsy research or clinical practice.
“Narcolepsy-related dreams have been an overlooked symptom within narcolepsy,” Mundt said. “People in the study had nightmares for decades but never received treatment, for various reasons. They may have not been asked about nightmares, didn’t know nightmare treatments existed, or felt embarrassed about having nightmares and didn’t mention it to a doctor.”
Mundt said it is important to refer these patients for treatment because many of them don’t know anything can be done, “and treatment can completely transform their sleep and sometimes even the way they feel in the daytime in a matter of weeks,” she said.
First study to apply CBT to narcolepsy-related nightmares
Previous research has shown cognitive behavioral therapy for nightmares (CBT-N) is effective in treating trauma-related nightmares, but this is the first study to show it might also be applicable to narcolepsy.
All six participants in the study received CBT-N via weekly telehealth sessions. These sessions educated participants on nightmares, sleep habits, bedtime factors and how to relax and improve one’s mood before bedtime.
Using CBT-N, all six study participants rewrote their nightmares into dreams they would prefer to have (called rescripting) and rehearsed these revised scripts before falling asleep every night.
CBT-N plus lucid dreaming
During week five of the study, half the study participants also underwent an additional procedure in the laboratory of Ken Paller, professor of psychology at Northwestern. While each person napped, the scientists tried to induce a lucid dream using a procedure previously shown to be effective, targeted lucidity reactivation (TLR).
An earlier study from Paller’s lab that used TLR found that dreaming individuals could interact with scientists in the lab to engage in real-time communication during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep. Most lucid dreams are thought to occur during REM sleep. People with narcolepsy tend to experience lucid dreams frequently in their REM sleep, Mundt said, so the new study adapted the TLR procedure to capitalize on that.
Using electroencephalogram (EEG) to monitor brain activity, scientists determined when a study participant entered the REM stage. Once REM was observed, the scientists softly played sound cues associated with lucidity and with each rescripted dream. These cues can trigger a lucid dream and promote the rescripted dream scenario. One of the sound cues was a piano chord that participants had learned to associate with their new dream by listening to it while rehearsing their dream at bedtime. Another cue included a few words that captured their new dream, such as “calm” or “family.”
“This research highlights a new orientation to sleep, opening the door to novel methods for fine-tuning sleep to try to enhance the benefits of sleep and perhaps make people more likely to wake up on the right side of the bed,” said Paller, who also is the director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Program in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.
Breakdown of the findings
At post-treatment, all participants rated their nightmares as less severe and less frequent, and for four of the six, nightmare severity even dipped below the cutoff for having nightmare disorder, Mundt said.
One participant in the TLR group didn’t enter REM sleep, so no sound cues were delivered. The other two entered REM sleep during the nap, and one signaled being lucid by moving their eyes back and forth (as planned). The other participant did not signal they were lucid during REM, however, both recalled dreams that were similar to their rescripted dreams.
“When they were telling us about their dreams, they remembered similarities to the rescripted scenario,” Mundt said. “This is really unique — that after the TLR procedure they experienced aspects of the dream ideas they concocted — since people undergoing CBT-N don’t usually experience their rescripted dream.”
Due to the small sample size, the scientists didn’t compare the two groups (CBT-N vs. CBT-N plus TLR), Mundt said. Rather, this study provided a proof-of-concept demonstration that it is possible to adapt TLR for narcolepsy-related nightmares.
Participants described feeling less anxious and ashamed about nightmares following the treatment.
“It’s empowering for them,” Mundt said. “They’re so surprised this works. It increases self-efficacy for managing their symptoms, and they describe how glad they are that this helped. It’s really a game-changer, mentally.”
The study is titled, “Treating narcolepsy-related nightmares with cognitive behavioral therapy and targeted lucidity reactivation: A pilot study.”
END
Nixing narcolepsy nightmares
Novel therapeutic approach used to combat nightmares, first-of-its-kind study shows
2024-10-23
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Mass General Brigham selected to receive $3.29 million award from ARPA-H’s Sprint for Women’s Health
2024-10-23
Mass General Brigham has been selected by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) as an awardee of the Sprint for Women’s Health to address critical unmet challenges in women’s health, champion transformative innovations, and tackle health conditions that uniquely or disproportionately affect women. Mass General Brigham will receive $3.29 million in funding over two years through the Sprint for Women’s Health spark track for early-stage research efforts.
Understanding and improving sleep is especially important for women, who face a higher risk of neurodegenerative diseases ...
The decision to eat may come down to these three neurons
2024-10-23
Speaking, singing, coughing, laughing, yelling, yawning, chewing—we use our jaws for many purposes. Each action requires a complex coordination of muscles whose activity is managed by neurons in the brain.
But it turns out that the neural circuit behind the jaw movement most essential to survival—eating—is surprisingly simple, as researchers from Rockefeller University recently described in a new paper in Nature. Christin Kosse and other scientists from the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics, headed by Jeffrey M. Friedman, have identified a three-neuron circuit that connects a hunger-signaling hormone to the jaw movements of chewing. ...
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution researchers use the sounds of healthy coral reefs to encourage growth of a new species of coral larvae
2024-10-23
Woods Hole, Mass. – Coral reefs worldwide are in trouble. These ecosystems support a billion people and more than a quarter of marine species. Still, many have been damaged by unsustainable fishing and tourism, coastal construction, nutrient runoff, and climate change. Now, researchers have shown that broadcasting the sounds of healthy reefs is a way to encourage larval corals to repopulate degraded sites and help revitalize them.
A recent study done by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) showed that golfball coral larvae can be encouraged to settle when they hear the sounds of a vibrant, healthy reef. This is the second coral species ...
Researchers at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and KAIST develop method to 'hear' defects in promising nanomaterial
2024-10-23
An international research team led by NYU Tandon School of Engineering and KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) has pioneered a new technique to identify and characterize atomic-scale defects in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), a two-dimensional (2D) material often dubbed "white graphene" for its remarkable properties.
This advance could accelerate the development of next-generation electronics and quantum technologies.
The team reported that it was able to detect the presence of individual carbon atoms replacing boron atoms in hBN crystals. This discovery was made possible by listening to ...
Biodiversity increases nutrient availability
2024-10-23
Animals not only need sufficient calories to function, but also essential nutrients — including omega-3 and omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA). Insects and arachnids are an important source of these essential fatty acids for birds, hedgehogs, lizards and the like. However, the content depends on the specific types of insects and spiders consumed. Aquatic insects, such as caddisflies or dragonflies, contain significantly more omega-3 long-chain (LC) PUFA than terrestrial insects because omega-3- LC-PUFA rich algae form the base of the food chain in aquatic ecosystems.
The ...
American Society of Anesthesiologists names Donald E. Arnold, M.D., FACHE, FASA, new president
2024-10-23
PHILADELPHIA — Donald E. Arnold, M.D., FACHE, FASA, chair of the Department of Anesthesiology, Mercy Hospital in St. Louis and member of the board of directors of Western Anesthesiology Associates, Inc., in Ballwin, Missouri, was today named president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), the nation’s largest organization of anesthesiologists. Dr. Arnold assumed office at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2024 annual meeting and will serve for one year.
“I’m honored to be named president of ASA and committed to serving our members, supporting the Society’s mission to advance the specialty, preserving physician-led anesthesia care, and above ...
Family as a wealth factor
2024-10-23
Wealth is one of the strongest indicators of social status, acting as a key indicator of social inequality and influencing access to education, health care and professional success. In a study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, the University of Cologne, GESIS and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health examined how financial wealth changes related to various generational transitions within families. The study used data from Norwegian registries and focused on people born in 1953.
Investigating changes in wealth within the ...
Breathing deep: A metabolic secret of ethane-consuming archaea unraveled
2024-10-23
Seeps on the deep seafloor naturally emit alkanes, which are pollutants that are potentially dangerous to life and act on global warming. Fortunately, the sediments around the seeps host microbes that act as a biological filter: They consume most of the alkanes before their release into the oceans and our atmosphere. This so-called anaerobic oxidation of alkanes is an important yet poorly understood microbial process. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, now ...
NIH clinical trial will test precision medicine treatments for myeloid cancers
2024-10-23
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a proof-of-concept precision medicine clinical trial to test new treatment combinations targeting specific genetic changes in the cancer cells of people with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). The trial, funded by NIH’s National Cancer Institute (NCI), aims to accelerate the discovery of more tailored treatments for these aggressive cancers of the blood and bone marrow.
“AML and MDS are a heterogeneous group of cancers that can progress very quickly. Treatment advances depend in part on the ability to rapidly identify which subtype of cancer each patient has so that treatments can be tested for ...
Novel antibody platform tackles viral mutations
2024-10-23
New York, NY, October 23, 2024 — Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in collaboration with colleagues in the field, have developed an innovative antibody platform aimed at tackling one of the greatest challenges in treating rapidly evolving viruses like SARS-CoV-2: their ability to mutate and evade existing vaccines and therapies.
Their findings, including preclinical studies in mice, introduce the Adaptive Multi-Epitope Targeting and Avidity-Enhanced (AMETA) Nanobody Platform, a new antibody approach for addressing how viruses like SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, evolve to evade vaccines and treatments. Details on the results were published October 23 ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
Towards a new era of global agricultural ecology and environmental science
Durham University scientists pioneer new drone swarm technology
New research reveals insights into linkage between menopause and cardiovascular health
Durham University scientists map stress response system in plants
Weight-loss drug semaglutide reduces cocaine use in rats: Suggests possible first pharmacological treatment for human cocaine dependency
Are probiotics worth the cost to prevent infection after a colon removal surgery?
Mizzou at the forefront of using hydrogen energy safely
New design framework makes it easier to create custom shock-absorbing materials
Ochsner Health honored by AMA for Joy in Medicine
New meta-analysis demonstrates that access to the GeneSight test can significantly improve response and remission rates for patients with depression
UCLA receives $7.1M federal grant to expand psychotherapy treatment for chronic pain
One dose of antibiotic treats early syphilis as well as three doses
Researchers identify single antibody behind life-threatening reaction to common blood thinner
Don’t sweat it: New device detects sweat biomarker at minimal perspiration rate
Not so sweet: Some sugar substitutes linked to faster cognitive decline
Antibody-making cells reveal new function in response to flu infection
CCNY physicists make quantum emitter discovery in diamonds
SwRI and Copeland win R&D 100 Award for innovative oil-free compressor
Loneliness is bad for health and wealth in the U.K.
Oral health treatment in patients due for surgery is associated with significantly lower rates of postoperative pneumonia and shorter hospital stays, per observational study in one Japanese hospital,
Oxygen came late to ocean depths during Paleozoic
Among women suffering hyperemesis (extreme nausea and vomiting) in pregnancy, half report considering terminating their pregnancy, and 9 in 10 have considered having no more children
Loneliness is bad for health and wealth in the UK
Climate change is making rollercoaster harvests the new normal
Misdirected: Increased dementia risk associated with errors of the 'brain’s compass'
Sip smarter: Apple juice effects on oral health are short-lived, study suggests
Vegan dog food provides similar nutrients to meat-based diets, new study finds
The cling of doom: How staph bacteria latch onto human skin
Emotional and medical toll of extreme pregnancy nausea, with many women considering ending pregnancies
DNA analysis shows colorectal cancer has unique microbial fingerprint
[Press-News.org] Nixing narcolepsy nightmaresNovel therapeutic approach used to combat nightmares, first-of-its-kind study shows