Association of Locomotor Activity During Sleep Deprivation Treatment With Response.

Ulrich Ebner-Priemer,Michael Deuschle,Michael Schredl,Jinhyuk Kim,Lea Sirignano,Stephanie H. Witt,Fabian Streit,Yoshiharu Yamamoto,Lea Zillich,Josef Frank,Jerome Clifford Foo,Claudia Schilling,Maria Gilles,Nina Trautmann,Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg,Marcella Rietschel

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00688

Abstract

Disrupted circadian rhythms and sleep patterns are frequently observed features of psychiatric disorders, and especially mood disorders. Sleep deprivation treatment (SD) exerts rapid but transient antidepressant effects in depressed patients and has gained recognition as a model to study quick-acting antidepressant effects. It is of interest how locomotor activity patterns during SD might be associated with and potentially predict treatment response. The present study is an analysis of locomotor activity data, previously collected over a 24 h period, to examine the night of SD (Trautmann et al. 2018) as mood disorder patients suffering from a depressive episode (n = 78; after exclusions n = 59) underwent SD. In this exploratory analysis, the associations between response to SD, locomotor activity, and subjective mood during the 24 h period of SD were explored. Higher levels of activity overall were observed in non-responders (n = 18); in particular, non-responders moved more during the evening of SD until midnight and remained high thereafter. In contrast, activity in responders (n = 41) decreased during the evening and increased in the morning. Subjective mood was not found to be associated with locomotor activity. The window of data available in this analysis being limited, additional data from before and after the intervention are required to fully characterize the results observed. The present results hint at the possible utility of locomotor activity as a predictor and early indicator of treatment response, and suggest that the relationship between SD and locomotor activity patterns should be further investigated.

Highlights

Disruption of sleep and circadian rhythms are often reported as features of psychiatric disorders, and chronotherapeutic treatments targeting the circadian system have shown the ability to affect disease symptoms [1,2,3,4,5]
Altered psychomotor behavior has been found to be associated with many psychiatric disorders and disrupted circadian rhythmicity observed in affective disorders can be reflected in locomotor activity patterns [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29]
A pedigree study examining genetic contributions to circadian rhythms segregating by bipolar disorder (BD) severity showed that BD individuals consistently demonstrated lower levels of activity than their non-BD relatives [35]

Summary

Introduction

Disruption of sleep and circadian rhythms are often reported as features of psychiatric disorders, and chronotherapeutic treatments targeting the circadian system have shown the ability to affect disease symptoms [1,2,3,4,5]. Compared to healthy controls, individuals suffering from depression display lower mean activity levels [27, 36, 37] but higher variability over the whole day as well as in the active morning period [36]. The characterization of these relationships is becoming increasingly feasible thanks to recent developments in wearable and mobile sensing technologies, especially in easy and non-invasive monitoring of locomotor activity [38,39,40] using wristwatch-type actigraph, making it a promising method which can be implemented with high compliance in clinical contexts

Methods

Results

Conclusion