By Cara Murez
HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, April 17, 2023 (HealthDay News) — Consistently good sleep is important for everyone, but it’s particularly important for schizophrenia patients, a new study suggests.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, along with collaborators in Italy, used wrist-based monitors to measure the activity and rest of 250 people, including 150 schizophrenia patients, in both outpatient settings and psychiatric hospitals.
The researchers found that schizophrenia patients had erratic sleep patterns, dysregulated transitions between sleep and wake cycles, and excessively rigid daily routines that predicted worse symptoms.
“Regulating sleep-wake cycles is important for your overall health, and our findings may also be extended to people without underlying mental health conditions,” said study lead author Dr. Fabio Ferrarelli, an associate professor of psychiatry at Pitt. . “Most people can benefit from better sleep hygiene and paying attention to their daily routines by incorporating activity and variety into their daily lives.”
Well-established research literature suggests that people with schizophrenia have trouble falling asleep and get less sleep than people without mental health problems.
Sedatives used to control the symptoms of schizophrenia can extend sleep to 15 hours per day. Sleeping too much in this way can have a negative effect on symptoms.
“It’s important to consider how the drugs we prescribe to patients affect their health more broadly,” Ferrarelli said in a Pitt news release. “Our study shows that 12 to 15 hours of sleep can be harmful, and it’s important to avoid prescribing too many sedatives and use the lowest possible dose.”
Both hospitalized and outpatient schizophrenia patients tended to have fewer active hours during the day and spent more time sleeping or passively resting than healthy controls in the study, the findings showed.
Hospitalized patients had more fragmented sleep and more abrupt transitions between rest and activity compared with the outpatient group. They also had more rigid daily rest and activity rhythms than outpatients. That was correlated with a higher degree of negative mental health symptoms in these patients, including lower motivation to interact with others and a lower ability to feel pleasure.
“The consistency between the two patient cohorts surprised us a bit,” Ferrarelli said. “But interestingly, we found that residential patients had much more stable daily routines. We tend to think that stable routines are a good thing, but when these routines become too rigid, they can present a problem. In our study, this rigidity in daily rhythms was strongly correlated with the severity of negative mental health symptoms in residential patients with schizophrenia.”
The findings were published April 14 in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. This research was supported by the US National Institute of Mental Health.
The researchers suggested that varying your daily routines and incorporating movement into your life are two simple steps everyone can take to improve and protect their brain health.
“Especially as people get older, we tend to get deeper into our routines,” Ferrarelli said. “Routines provide a sense of control in our lives and can be very beneficial. But if a routine is too rigid, it can backfire. Keeping a consistent sleep schedule while mixing up your daily tasks and dividing them into different days of the week is a great way to add variety to your schedule and improve your health in the long run.”
More information
The US National Institute of Mental Health has more about schizophrenia.
SOURCE: University of Pittsburgh, press release, April 14, 2023