Pathophysiology of sleep disturbances/unrefreshing sleep in pwME?

Thanks for sharing your experience. I experience the same. Do you take gabapentin regularly? Have you tried any other medication - if so, how were the results?

 

No need to be a Dr. or PhD!

I honestly have not been able to fully go through it, but yes - sleep is very complex and amongst others is important for protein homeostasis.

 

I got some insights from the PI of a couple of these studies:

 

I've been thinking more about this, and while waste removal and cellular repair might be an important function of sleep, that doesn't mean that's the cause of why or how we perceive the feeling of being rested or not rested. I expect there's a lot of common knowledge of sleep that arose a long time ago (ancient Greece?) that simply hasn't been challenged, and will turn out to be wrong. So, we can't rule out microarousal architecture as the cause of ME's "unrestful sleep" symptom.

I'm not going to jump on it as a likely cause though. It doesn't match what I'd expect to see from different lengths of sleep or changes in sleep conditions, etc.

 

Could you elaborate on what you'd expect to see (and with whom)?

 

I'd expect the severity of the "unrestfullness" to vary a lot more with different factors. If the symptom severity was due to lack of the restorative functions of sleep, it should consistently get worse the longer since the last sleep. I've had several nights of insomnia, yet I didn't feel significantly less rested even after several nights.

My actual productivity doesn't seem to correlate with the "unrestfullness" symptom. I can awaken feeling unrested, yet manage to get a lot done that day, so the feeling doesn't seem to correlate with actual physical reduction.

Foods can significantly affect my sleep length and number of awakenings, yet doesn't correlate with the unrestfullness symptom.


When we learn something new about how our bodies function, it's sensible to ask "can this explain this disorder?". I can imagine that microarousals could affect the feeling of rested vs unrested, but I'm just not seeing evidence supporting that. My personal experience points to "unrestful sleep" being caused by some factor unrelated to sleep.

 

I am not hypothesizing that "symptom severity" was due to this. I am questioning the pathophysiology of unrestful sleep and questioning whether this symptom can't be tackled adequately by specifically addressing the differences seen in PSG.

Again, if infraslow power and microarousals play a role, we're talking about things you would not perceive. We are not talking about anything you perceive during the night.

I think we're running in circles, let's keep it here