Neurophysiological biomarkers of insomnia treatment response: towards personalized therapeutic approaches in chronic insomnia
Description: Insomnia is a frequent problem in the general population and is associated with physical and mental health problems. It is still difficult to treat insomnia. Indeed, sleeping pills have side effects and tend to lose efficacy over time in many people with insomnia. Psychological treatment for insomnia - called cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT-I) - is effective in a majority of people with insomnia, even in the long term, but requires access to qualified therapists. In addition, up to 40% people will still have insomnia symptoms after treatment. In order to provide the treatment option that is the most likely to work for each specific person, it is important to be able to predict which individuals will respond better to CBT-I. Brain electrical signals measured with electroencephalography (EEG) during sleep (particularly a type of brain signal called sleep spindle) tend to vary from one person to another, but remain stable from one night to the other in a specific person; for this reason, they are considered as a 'trait', i.e. a fingerprint characterizing a specific individual. Some of our preliminary work shows that insomniacs with less sleep spindles tend to benefit less from CBT-I treatment. This means that sleep spindle could be used to predict if people will be likely to have their sleep improved after CBT-I before it is used. In this project, we now wish to confirm these results on a larger group of insomniacs, using more detailed measures of sleep spindles. We also wish to define reference values of sleep spindles - adjusted for age and sex - that will allow identifying insomniacs likely to respond to CBT-I. The findings from this research will allow evaluating if a brain electrical measure such as spindles can be used to predict the efficacy of the recommended first-line treatment option for insomnia, and can thus be used as a tool to guide which treatment to recommend in a specific person.
Amount: CA$671,600
Funding type: research
Funder scheme: Project Grant
Start date: 2017-04-01
End date: 2022-03-31
Investigator: Thien Thanh Dang-Vu
Topic: Sleep and related disorders
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Funded outputs count: 25
Funder award ID: 153115_1
OpenAlex ID: G3206604270