PTSD-related hyperarousal assessed during sleep

Abstract

Posttraumatic stress disorder is widely understood to include “persistent symptoms of increased arousal.” This presumption has rarely been tested under conditions in which effects of anticipatory anxiety could be ruled out. In this study, heart rate and electroencephalogram spectral power were assessed during sleep, a state free of most sources of artifact contaminating indices of tonic arousal. Fifty-six unmedicated nonapneic Vietnam combat-related inpatients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 14 controls spent 3 or more nights in the sleep laboratory during which their electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms were continuously recorded. Heart rate and electroencephalogram spectral power were quantified continuously off-line and averaged by sleep stage over all postadaptational nights. Sleep heart rate exhibited no group differences and no covariation with the severity of subjective hyperarousal reported by PTSD patients. PTSD patients exhibited a trend toward reduced low-frequency electroencephalogram spectral power during nonrapid-eye-movement (NREM) sleep. This reduction was significant during slow-wave sleep in those subjects producing scoreable slow-wave sleep. The relationship of rapid-eye-movement (REM) beta-band power to NREM beta-band power was different in PTSD patients and controls, with the patients exhibiting more beta in REM versus NREM sleep than controls. In patients, NREM sleep sigma-band electroencephalogram spectral power exhibited a positive correlation with subjective hyperarousal. Finally, a novel and surprisingly strong inverse correlation between REM-NREM sleep heart rate difference and REM percent of sleep was observed in PTSD patients only. In summary, peripheral and central measures of tonic arousal during sleep demonstrated contrastive relations to PTSD diagnostic and symptom status. The data suggest that more consideration should be directed to mechanisms of central arousal in PTSD.