Article: Overanxious and underslept, 2019, Ben Simon et al

[Andy]

Are you feeling anxious? Did you sleep poorly last night? Sleep disruption is a recognized feature of all anxiety disorders. Here, we investigate the basic brain mechanisms underlying the anxiogenic impact of sleep loss. Additionally, we explore whether subtle, societally common reductions in sleep trigger elevated next-day anxiety. Finally, we examine what it is about sleep, physiologically, that provides such an overnight anxiety-reduction benefit. We demonstrate that the anxiogenic impact of sleep loss is linked to impaired medial prefrontal cortex activity and associated connectivity with extended limbic regions. In contrast, non-rapid eye movement (NREM) slow-wave oscillations offer an ameliorating, anxiolytic benefit on these brain networks following sleep. Of societal relevance, we establish that even modest night-to-night reductions in sleep across the population predict consequential day-to-day increases in anxiety. These findings help contribute to an emerging framework explaining the intimate link between sleep and anxiety and further highlight the prospect of non-rapid eye movement sleep as a therapeutic target for meaningfully reducing anxiety.

Paywall, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0754-8
Not available via Scihub at time of posting.

 

[rvallee]

We demonstrate that the anxiogenic impact of sleep loss is linked to impaired medial prefrontal cortex activity and associated connectivity with extended limbic regions

That's a very biased assumption. It could be that whatever "anxiety" means here is a result of, not the cause. Anxiety is typically excessive worry about specific things. If we're talking about the impact of sleep loss, we're not at all talking about the same thing. Too much caffeine gives the shakes, that's still not anxiety by any definition even though superficially it looks quite similar.

Has medical science simply given up being careful about not mixing up the direction of causality? I guess that has to logically follow not caring anymore about correlation not meaning causation and not being bothered by subjective evidence from open labels trials run by biased and conflicted researchers. Centuries of progress cast aside because it's too hard to do it right...